Conflux

Technical Documents

Conflux Network is a scalable and decentralized blockchain system with high throughput and fast confirmation. It operates a novel consensus protocol GHAST which optimistically processes concurrent blocks without discarding any as forks, and adaptively assigns heterogeneous weights to blocks based on their topologies in the ledger structure (called Tree-Graph). Therefore Conflux is able to achieve high throughput as well as fast confirmation and liveness guarantee.

We provide a rigorous security proof for the GHAST protocol. When adversarial computing power is bounded away from 50%, GHAST guarantees logarithmically bounded liveness and low confirmation latency.

We also evaluated Conflux on Amazon EC2 clusters with up to 12,000 Conflux full nodes. The consensus protocol of Conflux achieves a consensus throughput of 9.6Mbps with per node network bandwidth limit of 20Mbps. On a combined workload of random payment transactions and Ethereum historical transactions, the Conflux Network achieves an end-to-end throughput of up to 3,480 transactions per second while confirming transactions under one minute.

Technical Presentation

The scalability issue of the current blockchain

Undesirable user experience

Long processing delay caused by low throughput

Skyrocketing transaction fees

Naive Solution

Generate a lot of forks

Cannot decide consistent total order of blocks in forks

Forks waste resources and harm safety

Conflux Solution

Use Parent and Reference edges to construct Tree-Graph

Introduce pivot chain and epoch to consistently determine total order of blocks and transactions

Use GHAST rule to secure the pivot chain

Results show > 3000tps