DAG Meets BFT: The Next Generation of BFT Consensus with Alexander Spiegelman | a16z crypto research

An overview of recent developments in the theory and practice of directed acyclic graph (DAG) based Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus. Alexander Spiegelman (Aptos) discusses how the Narwhal protocol decouples data from meta to build a highly efficient DAG. Sasha then explains how the protocol can locally (with zero communication overhead) totally order the nodes of the DAG by using DAG-Rider/Tusk/Bullshark.

About the speaker
Alexander (Sasha) obtained his PhD from the Technion in 2018, where he worked with Idit Keidar on Distributed Systems, focusing mostly on reliable storage, consensus, reconfiguration, and concurrency. Before joining Aptos, Sasha was a research scientist at Novi Research and VMware Research, where he worked on Blockchain performance and scalability, including Asynchronous BFT and parallel execution.

About a16z crypto research
a16z crypto research is a multidisciplinary lab that works closely with our portfolio companies and others toward solving the important problems in the space, and toward advancing the science and technology of the next generation of the internet.

Our researchers are technologists, scientists, cryptographers, and cryptocurrency experts, working to bridge the worlds of academic theory with industry practice, and to help shape crypto and web3 as a formal area of study. More about us: a16z.com/2022/04/21/announcing-a16z-crypto-research

More from the a16z crypto team
- Subscribe to our 'web3 weekly newsletter': a16zcrypto.substack.com
- Listen to our 'web3 with a16z' podcast: a16zcrypto.com/web3-with-a16z-podcast/
- Read more of our work: a16zcrypto.com