Let’s dive into another key feature of Solana that many users likely have never heard of: Tower BFT… 🧵👇🏼
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This is a somewhat brief thread in an ongoing series on the unique features that power Solana, found on my profile, that is digestible for non-technical readers.
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Tower BFT is one of the key ingredients of Solana. It plays an important role in ensuring the security and reliability of the network.
It is important to first understand Solana’s Proof of History mechanism, found below:
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twitter.com/marbiusc/status/1600169285732532228?s=46&t=etj7VcJkTPDgfpoZEhcaQA
In decentralized networks, nodes need to reach consensus on the order in which transactions are processed.
This ensures that the network remains consistent and that transactions are processed correctly.
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Reaching consensus can be challenging, especially in a high-throughput network like Solana.
Tower BFT is a solution to this problem.
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Tower BFT leverages Solana’s PoH as a clock before consensus to reduce messaging overhead and latency.
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Tower BFT is a variation of the traditional Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanism, which enables nodes to reach consensus even in the presence of faulty or malicious nodes.
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In the case of Solana, Tower BFT allows for node consensus regarding the order in which transactions are processed using PoH as a global source of time, ensuring that the network remains consistent and secure.
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TL;DR
Tower BFT = high transaction speeds while maintaining security and reliability. Liveness > consistency.
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I left out quite a few key details to keep this thread short and easy to understand at a high level. More technical readers should reference @aeyakovenko’s Medium Article linked below: medium.com/solana-labs/tower-bft-solanas-high-performance-implementation-of-pbft-464725911e79
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Marbius 🌻
@MarbiusC
Spend most of my time researching. What I share is free and worth every penny. Unrolled threads in link👇🏼