Cerberus Whitepaper & Academic Validation

Overview

The Cerberus whitepaper presents the formal specification of the Cerberus consensus protocol. Originally published as a preprint in 2020, it was peer-reviewed and published in the Journal of Systems Research (JSys) in June 2023.

Key Contributions

• Braided cross-shard consensus — Dynamic consensus groups formed per-transaction across relevant shards
• 3-phase commit protocol — Pre-prepare, prepare, commit with formal safety proofs
• Minimalistic design — Simple per-shard BFT instances composed via a braiding protocol
• Deterministic state provisioning — Enabling global consensus between shard groups

Validation

The Hyperscale public test (January 2026) validated Cerberus at scale: 500,000+ sustained TPS with peaks over 700,000–800,000 TPS across 128 shards. These were complex DeFi swap transactions, not simple transfers. Linear scaling was confirmed — doubling shards (64→128) doubled throughput.

External Links

• Full Paper (arXiv PDF)
• Cerberus Consensus Peer Reviewed (Blog)
• Consensus Evolution at Radix