Aquarium: Combining Broadcast/Consensus in General Purpose Smart-Contract Platforms  Alberto Sonnino
Channel: ConsensusLab
Date: 2023-06-14

The Mysten Labs Team (Mysten Labs) — presented by Alberto Sonnino

Aquarium is a set of distributed systems safety and liveness protocols combining safely consensusless agreement for low-latency, with a consensus protocol to support traditional functions of a blockchain. It powers the first production-grade smart-contract platform with low latency transactions processing. Unlike prior work, Aquarium use of consensuless agreement does not compromise expressiveness or throughput and is able to run perpetually without restarts by integrating it with a high-throughput consensus protocol. To achieve this, we develop novel algorithms that merge seemlessly the two modes. This feat is especially delicate during reconfiguration events, where we need to preserve safety of the consensusless path without compromising the long-term liveness of potentially misconfigured clients. Aquarium combined with the Move Programming language enables safe execution of smart-contracts that exposes objects as a first-class resource. Using this object-centric focus, Aquarium achieves sub-second latency and harvests workload parallelism during transaction execution.

ConsensusDays 23 Session 1.2- Systems
Site: https://research.protocol.ai/sites/consensusday23/
Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxN6L-h3wFfsRKLCj4I8xKeKjy9OL-EY6