hyperledger/sawtooth-pbft-engine repository overview

Sawtooth PBFT is a consensus engine for Hyperledger Sawtooth that provides practical Byzantine fault tolerance. PBFT is a voting-based consensus algorithm that is:

• Byzantine fault tolerant: Network liveness and safety are guaranteed even when some nodes are faulty or malicious, as long as a minimum percentage of nodes are connected, working properly, and behaving honestly.

• Non-forking: Blocks committed by nodes are final, unlike lottery-style consensus algorithms such as Proof of Work (PoW) or Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET).

• Leader-based: A primary node is responsible for producing candidate blocks; secondary nodes vote on the blocks produced by the primary. The leader changes in a round-robin (circular) order.

• Communication-intensive: Nodes send many messages to reach consensus, commit blocks, and maintain a healthy leader node. A Sawtooth PBFT network does not support open enrollment, but nodes can be added and removed by an administrator. Full peering is required (all nodes must be connected to all other nodes). In order to provide Byzantine fault tolerance, a PBFT network must have a least four nodes.