Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
We address the problem of online payments, where users can transfer funds among themselves. We introduce Astro, a system solving this problem efficiently in a decentralized, deterministic, and completely asynchronous manner. Astro builds on the insight that consensus is unnecessary to prevent double-spending. Instead of consensus, Astro relies on a weaker primitive - Byzantine reliable broadcast - enabling a simpler and more efficient implementation than consensus-based payment systems.In terms of efficiency, Astro executes a payment by merely broadcasting a message. The distinguishing feature of Astro is that it can maintain performance robustly, i.e., remain unaffected by a fraction of replicas being compromised or slowed down by an adversary. Our experiments on a public cloud network show that Astro can achieve near-linear scalability in a sharded setup, going from 10K payments/sec (2 shards) to 20K payments/sec (4 shards). In a nutshell, Astro can match VISA-level average payment throughput, and achieves a 5×improvement over a state-of-the-art consensus-based solution,while exhibiting sub-second 95th percentile latency.
Bryan Alexander Ford, Linus Gasser, Philipp Svetolik Jovanovic, Nicolas Gailly, Ismail Khoffi
Bryan Alexander Ford, Linus Gasser, Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Philipp Svetolik Jovanovic, Nicolas Gailly, Ismail Khoffi