June 23, 2020
Zsolt Istvan
Permissioned blockchains can offer a mechanism for transacting across several, not necessarily trusting, entities but they are often not reaching high performance due to the cost of the underlying consensus protocols. When deploying these systems in fast networking environments, there is an opportunity for acceleration by considering all available hardware features, such as FPGAs, programmable NICs and switches, to reduce consensus cost. In this talk, I will provide an overview of Permissioned Blockchains, their use of Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols, and then deconstruct one such protocol with the goal of forecasting the benefits of various acceleration strategies.