Research Seminar Series: UO’s Dr. Suyash Gupta

From Dr. Gupta: In this talk, I will introduce our recent work, which we recently presented at SIGMOD 2025. We designed a new BFT consensus protocol, HotStuff-1, that improves the latency of HotStuff-2 by two network-hops while maintaining linear communication complexity against faults. Additionally, HotStuff-1 incorporates an incentive-compatible leader rotation regime that motivates leaders to commit consensus decisions promptly.

HotStuff-1 achieves a reduction by two network hops by sending clients early finality confirmations speculatively, after one phase of the protocol. Unlike previous speculation regimes, the early finality confirmation path of HotStuff-1 is fault-tolerant and the latency improvement does not rely on optimism. We also expose prefix speculation dilemma, an important safety consideration that occurs with leader replacement, and HotStuff-1 is the first protocol that resolves it with linear complexity.

HotStuff-1 embodies an additional mechanism, slotting, that thwarts real-world delays caused by rationally-incentivized leaders. Leaders may also be inclined to sabotage each other’s progress via tail-forking. The slotting mechanism allows leaders to dynamically drive as many decisions as possible allowed by network transmission delays before view timers expire, thus mitigating both threats.

Email occoe@pdx.edu to attend to the virtual presentation.