English

Snowman for partial synchrony

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing 2025-05-27 v3

Abstract

Snowman is the consensus protocol run by blockchains on Avalanche. Recent work established a rigorous proof of probabilistic consistency for Snowman in the \emph{synchronous} setting, under the simplifying assumption that correct processes execute sampling rounds in `lockstep'. In this paper, we describe a modification of the protocol that ensures consistency in the \emph{partially synchronous} setting, and when correct processes carry out successive sampling rounds at their own speed, with the time between sampling rounds determined by local message delays.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.15904,
  title  = {Snowman for partial synchrony},
  author = {Aaron Buchwald and Stephen Buttolph and Andrew Lewis-Pye and Kevin Sekniqi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.15904},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2404.14250

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:19:14.054Z