Abstract:As Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols are increasingly adopted for user-facing applications such as payments and smart contracts, it is crucial that they provide low latency. To reduce latency, some BFT consensus protocols use a leaderless, speculative, fast path where clients broadcast requests directly to replicas, enabling end-to-end commit latency of two message delays ($2\Delta$). However, such a fast path is extremely fragile: concurrent requests can cause replicas to diverge when they receive requests in different orders, triggering costly recovery procedures.
This paper presents Aspen, a leaderless speculative BFT protocol that handles concurrent requests while achieving near-optimal latency of $2\Delta + \epsilon$. The $\epsilon$ term is a short waiting delay introduced by Aspen's best effort ordering layer, which uses loosely synchronized clocks and network delay estimates to provide a tentative order. To make its fast path even more robust to intermittent divergence, Aspen adds extra replicas ($n = 3f + 2p + 1$) as well as novel recovery mechanisms that allow the system to tolerate divergence while preserving safety and performance.
In experiments with geo-distributed replicas, Aspen reduces the median latency of requests by $1.1\times$--$3.8\times$ compared to state-of-the-art BFT protocols, while sustaining up to $0.75\times$ the peak throughput of throughput-optimized designs.
From: Daniel Qian [view email]
[v1]
Tue, 6 Jan 2026 19:56:15 UTC (481 KB)
[v2]
Thu, 2 Jul 2026 17:24:25 UTC (193 KB)
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