Tenderbake offers quick deterministic finality, over 6 times faster block confirmation, and it is safe under asynchrony
- Tenderbake is BFT-like whereas Emmy+ is Nakamoto-like.
- Emmy+ has probabilistic finality making it more live but less safe, whereas Tenderbake has deterministic finality making it more safe but less live.
- Tenderbake also has noticeably quicker time to finality.
United States, April 11, 2021 /AlexaBlockchain/ – Nomadic Labs has released Tenderbakenet, a testnet for the new Tezos based experimental consensus algorithm Tenderbake. Tenderbake offers quick deterministic finality, over 6 times faster block confirmation, and it is safe under asynchrony.
Tenderbake is one of the biggest and much awaited upgrades, and it is likely to place Tezos as top blockchain network. “Top blockchain network” not in terms of “Total Market Cap” but based on parameters such as technology, applicability, innovation, creativity, and scalability. Tezos scores better than other platforms on these parameters. With one of the most active ecosystem in the blockchain industry, Tezos is likely to emerge as the preferred blockchain platform for a wider range of applications and use cases.
What is Tenderbake?
First outlined in 2020, this new algorithm is the product of a global collaboration between engineers and academic researchers, with infrastructure created in collaboration with the Baking Bad team.
The TQ Tezos team stated in an official post:
“More recently, the viability of the proposed consensus algorithm was supported by the formal verification of Theorems 5 and 6 outlined in that paper. Tenderbake is now closer than ever to a fully-featured economic protocol, and is currently being tested to identify potential implementation errors and optimize performance.”
Tenderbake: Why does it matter?
Tezos currently uses Emmy+ consensus algorithm. Tenderbake and Emmy+ belong to different algorithm families:
- Emmy+ is a Nakamoto style algorithm, whereas
- Tenderbake is a BFT-style algorithm.
So moving to Tenderbake would be a significant development on the Tezos network.
What advantages will Tenderbake bring to Tezos?
Tenderbake has quick, deterministic finality
From the point of view of the user, Tenderbake’s killer feature, relative to Emmy+, is that it offers deterministic finality: a block that has just been appended to the chain of some node is known to be final once it has two additional blocks on top of it, regardless of network latency.
Tenderbake is also fast, in the sense that it has a small (quick) time to finality: under typical good network conditions, and making a standard assumption of an attacker (“byzantine”) stake of at most 33% — meaning that at most 1/3 of the network is trying to undermine correct behaviour:
- In Tenderbake, one would expect to wait less than 1 minute for a block to be considered final, whereas
- In Emmy+, one would expect to wait at least 6 minutes.
Tenderbake is safe under asynchrony
From the point of view of a security analyst, Tenderbake has an advantage over Emmy+: no fork is possible, regardless of network delays, even during an asynchronous period.
Nakamoto is “live”, BFT is “safe”
As is so often the case in consensus, design boils down to making trade-offs: given that some asynchronous periods will eventually occur, do we prefer to be “live” or “safe” during them?
Nakamoto-style consensus algorithms favour being live: blocks are always produced, even in an asynchronous period. BFT-style algorithms favour being safe: production of blocks pauses during an asynchronous period.
Nomadic Labs states that the network model when designing Tenderbake assumes that any period of asynchrony is finite — It is based on the assumption that somebody is going to rush to fix the broken cable, protect against the DoS attack, and/or bring the server back online. So it makes sense to be safe and (essentially) just wait for the network to come back online.
