Hamster: A Fast Synchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant Protocol

Abstract

This paper presents Hamster, a novel synchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocol that achieves high throughput and weaker dependency on synchrony. Specifically, Hamster is the first to introduce coding techniques into synchronous BFT, addressing the challenges posed by higher fault tolerance requirements and significantly reducing communication complexity. Consequently, Hamster achieves linear throughput gains as the number of nodes increases, surpassing Sync HotStuff. Additionally, with minor modifications, Hamster can operate effectively in mobile sluggish environments, further reducing its dependency on strict synchrony. We implement Hamster, and experimental results highlight its performance advantages. Specifically, Hamster achieves $2.5\times $ the throughput of Sync HotStuff in a network of 9 nodes, with this gain growing to $10\times $ as the network scales to 65 nodes. This increasing throughput advantage makes Hamster more applicable to large-scale distributed systems.