BigDipper: A hyperscale BFT system with short term censorship resistance

Byzantine-fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols underlie a variety of decentralized applications including payments, auctions, data feed oracles, and decentralized social networks. In most leader-based BFT protocols, an important property that has been missing is the censorship resistance of transaction in the short term. The protocol should provide inclusion guarantees in the next block height even if the current and future leaders have the intent of censoring. In this paper, we present a BFT system, BigDipper, that achieves censorship resistance while providing fast confirmation for clients and hyperscale throughput. The core idea is to decentralize inclusion of transactions by allowing every BFT replica to create their own mini-block, and then enforcing the leader on their inclusions. To achieve this, BigDipper creates a modular system made of three components. First, we provide a transaction broadcast protocol used by clients as an interface to achieve a spectrum of probabilistic inclusion guarantees. Afterwards, a distribution of BFT replicas will receive the client's transactions and prepare mini-blocks to send to the data availability (DA) component. The DA component characterizes the censorship resistant properties of the whole system. We design three censorship resistant DA (DA-CR) protocols with distinct properties captured by three parameters and demonstrate their trade-offs. The third component interleaves the DA-CR protocols into the consensus path of leader based BFT protocols, it enforces the leader to include all the data from the DA-CR into the BFT block. We demonstrate an integration with a two-phase Hotstuff-2 BFT protocol with minimal changes. BigDipper is a modular system that can switch the consensus to other leader based BFT protocol including Tendermint.