Asymptote Fault Tolerance (AFT): Universally Breaking the Lower Bound with Relay-Free Deterministic 99% Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Asymptote Fault Tolerance (AFT): Universally Breaking the Lower Bound with Relay-Free Deterministic 99% Byzantine Fault Tolerance is the canonical yellow paper for the AFT protocol family. It presents a self-contained specification of a relay-free, coordinator-free, pure-software consensus and settlement architecture that combines proof-carrying canonical ordering, deterministic sealed-effect collapse, public recoverability, and restart continuity. The paper states the repository’s central claim: AFT delivers deterministic 99% Byzantine Tolerance, explicitly claims that the whole AFT stack universally breaks the lower bound with no qualifiers, and promotes that result to unconditional classical 99% Byzantine agreement in the ordinary dense-vote permissioned model. It also serves as the normative bridge between the implementation and the accompanying formal proof artifacts.