Title: Resilient and Scalable Architecture for Permissioned Blockchain Fabrics

Time: 12-1 PM Pacific Time, Friday March 5th, 2021

Zoom Link: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/93799624421?pwd=ZU01Zm9PQjR0TkJXSXpZSFBhU2Q3QT09

Since the introduction of Bitcoin—the first widespread application driven by blockchains—the interest in the design of blockchain-based applications has increased tremendously. At the core of these blockchain applications are consensus protocols that aim at securely replicating a client request among all replicas, even if some replicas are Byzantine faulty. Unfortunately, modern consensus protocols either yield low throughput or face design limitations.

In this work, we present the design of three consensus protocols that facilitate efficient consensus among the replicas. Our protocols help to scale consensus through the principles of phase-reduction, parallelization, and geo-scale clustering while ensuring no compromise in fault-tolerance. Further, we believe that the focus on consensus protocols is only one-side of the story. In specific, we present the design of a well-crafted permissioned blockchain fabric (ResilientDB) that can help even a slow consensus protocol outperform a faster protocol. Our results indicate that it is easy to scale BFT protocols to hundreds of replicas and achieve throughputs of the order 350K txns/s.

Suyash Gupta is pursuing doctoral research at the Computer Science Department at University of California, Davis. At UC Davis, he is a senior member of Exploratory Systems Lab. He also works as the Lead Architect at the blockchain startup Moka Blox. Prior to joining UC Davis, he started his doctoral research at the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. He earned a Master of Science degree from Purdue University in 2017 and transferred to UC Davis to complete his research. He also received a Master of Science (Research) degree from Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2015. His current research focuses on attaining safe and efficient, fault tolerant consensus in distributed and blockchain applications. He also has published works that present efficient optimizations and design for parallel and distributed algorithms. In his free time, Suyash likes to code and has won awards at several hackathons.