Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Overview

Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) is the property of a distributed system that enables it to reach consensus even when up to one-third of participating nodes are malicious, unresponsive, or sending conflicting information. The name comes from the Byzantine Generals Problem — a thought experiment about coordinating military strategy when some generals may be traitors.

All secure blockchain consensus protocols must be BFT. Radix's Cerberus is a BFT protocol that uniquely braids consensus across shards, achieving both fault tolerance and atomic composability in a sharded environment.