Asynchronous Algorand: Reaching Agreement with Near Linear Communication and Constant Expected Time

The celebrated Algorand protocol solves validated byzantine agreement in a scalable manner in the synchronous setting. In this paper, we study the feasibility of similar solutions in the asynchronous setting. Our main result is an asynchronous validated byzantine agreement protocol that we call Asynchronous Algorand. As with Algorand, it terminates in an expected constant number of rounds, and honest parties send an expected O(n polylog n) bits, where n is the number of parties. The protocol is resilient to a fully-asynchronous weak-adaptive adversary that can corrupt a near-optimal number of parties (< (1/3 - ϵ)n) and requires just a verifiable random function (VRF) setup and secure erasures.