REDONDA: A Next-Generation State-Machine Replication Protocol for Blockchain

The REDONDA project's ambition is to design a next-generation replication protocol for blockchain. To achieve this, the project taps into recent advances in networking, secure computing and distributed systems. At the scale of a datacenter, the protocol relies on two recent technologies: RDMA and TEE. Both technologies are leveraged to create a sub-microsecond consensus layer that tolerates Byzantine failures. TEEs are also used in a novel upgradable and portable smart contract engine to execute blockchain transactions across a variety of infrastructures and hardware. Between data centres, the protocol relies on leaderless state-machine replication. This recent approach decomposes transaction ordering into two sub-tasks that can execute in parallel, without a central coordinator to bottleneck the system. To ensure security and safety at runtime, the REDONDA project creates the blockchain protocol by composing mechanically-verified building blocks. The new blockchain protocol is assessed using real hardware against benchmarks and publicly available traces. We target that it scales across hundreds of geo-distributed nodes while offering 100k+ transactions per second and split-second latency.