SURFACE: A Practical Blockchain Consensus Algorithm for Real-World Networks
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SURFACE, stands for Secure, Use-case adaptive, and Relatively Fork-free Approach of Chain Extension, is a consensus algorithm that can be used for blockchains in real-world networks that enjoys the benefits from both Nakamoto consensus and Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus. In SURFACE, a committee is randomly selected every round to validate and endorse the proposed block. The size of the committee could be set accordingly to the network condition in such a way that the blockchain is almost fork-free with minimum overhead in communication. Hence, it achieves fast probabilistic confirmation with high throughput and low latency if the network is not in extreme situations such as large network partition or under attack. At the meantime, a BFT based mechanism is used to guarantee consistency in the extreme situations.
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