Chasing Lightspeed Consensus: Fast Wide-Area Byzantine Replication with Mercury

Blockchain technology sparked renewed interest in planetary-scale Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) state machine replication (SMR). While recent works predominantly focused on improving the scalability and throughput of these protocols, few of them addressed latency. We present Mercury, a novel transformation to autonomously optimize the latency of quorum-based BFT consensus. Mercury employs a dual resilience threshold that enables faster transaction ordering when the system contains few faulty replicas. Mercury allows forming compact quorums that substantially accelerate consensus using a smaller resilience threshold. Nevertheless, Mercury upholds standard SMR safety and liveness guarantees with optimal resilience, thanks to its judicious use of a dual operation mode and BFT forensics techniques. Our experiments spread tens of replicas across continents and reveal that Mercury can order transactions with finality in less than 0.4s, half the time of a PBFT-like protocol (optimal in terms of number of communication steps and resilience) in the same network. Furthermore, Mercury matches the latency of running its base protocol on theoretically optimal internet links (transmitting at 67% of the speed of light).