Cerberus vs Other BFT Protocols

Overview

Cerberus differs from other BFT protocols in a fundamental way: it enables atomic consensus across arbitrary sets of shards.

Traditional BFT (PBFT, HotStuff, Tendermint)

These protocols achieve consensus within a single group of validators. They don't natively support cross-shard atomicity — any sharded system using them requires additional coordination layers that compromise either composability or performance.

Cerberus Braiding

Cerberus forms dynamic consensus groups per-transaction, braiding across exactly the shards each transaction touches. A 3-phase commit protocol (pre-prepare, prepare, commit) ensures atomicity. The Cerberus whitepaper provides formal safety proofs, and the 500k TPS test validated linear scaling in practice.