Sui Lutris: Combining broadcast and consensus in a production blockchain

Traditional blockchains use consensus to sequence and execute transactions. More recent blockchain proposals use broadcast, a weaker, more scalable, and lower latency primitive. But broadcast is limited in terms of expressiveness, and system maintenance operations require (or at least are simpler) given the stronger guarantees provided by consensus. George Danezis (UCL, MystenLabs) presents both paradigms, and describes how to combine them in a single system to get both low-latency for important categories of transactions, as well as the full expressiveness of consensus in general. Safety and liveness become tricky because the two paradigms have to be combined consistently, and the broadcast-based paths need to provide robust guarantees upon reconfiguration, which relies on consensus.

About the speaker

George is a Professor of Security and Privacy Engineering at University College London and Chief Scientist at MystenLabs. His current research interests focus on secure communications, high-integrity systems to support privacy, blockchains, and decentralization, as well as the application of machine learning techniques to security problems. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers, co-founded chainspace.io in 2018, and co-founded MystenLabs in 2021. He has previously been a Researcher for Microsoft Research, Cambridge; and a visiting fellow at K.U.Leuven (Belgium) and the University of Cambridge (UK).

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