Message Size Matters: AlterBFT’s Approach to Practical Synchronous BFT in Public Clouds

Synchronous consensus protocols offer a significant advantage over their asynchronous and partially synchronous counterparts by providing higher fault tolerance—an essential benefit in distributed systems, like blockchains, where participants may have incentives to act maliciously. However, despite this advantage, synchronous protocols are often met with skepticism due to concerns about their performance, as the latency of synchronous protocols is tightly linked to a conservative time bound for message delivery.