Colosseum, a scalable and byzantine-fault tolerant consensus mechanism for permissioned systems

Abstract

This invention provides Colosseum, a Byzantine fault tolerant scalable method to achieve consensus, designed to maintain distributed ledgers over a permissioned peer-to-peer blockchain network that follows a curative approach towards achieving consensus. It assumes that adversaries are not always present in the system but efficiently detects malicious behaviour and alert the network. Colosseum follows a knockout tournament like approach over a structured ring network to have agreement on the next set of block proposers. Colosseum proposes a novel two-player game like approach which uses Proof-of-Win to eliminate nodes in each round of a tournament resulting in the selection of a subset of nodes after α (α<log 2 N, where N is the number of nodes in the network) number of rounds. It allows multiple block proposers for a tournament and tries to commit a maximum of their blocks using Converging Directed Acyclic Graph (CDAG) as the ledger to increase the throughput of the transactions.