Morpheus consensus: excelling on trails and autobahn

Lewis-Pye, Andrew and Shapiro, Ehud (2025) Morpheus consensus: excelling on trails and autobahn. In: 29th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems, 2025-12-03 - 2025-12-05, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi, Iaşi, Romania, ROM. (In Press)

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Abstract

Recent research in consensus has often focussed on protocols for State-Machine-Replication (SMR) that can handle high throughputs. Such state-of-the-art protocols (generally DAG-based) induce undue overhead when the needed throughput is low, or else exhibit unnecessarily-poor latency and communication complexity during periods of low throughput. Here we present Morpheus Consensus, which naturally morphs from a quiescent low-throughput leaderless blockchain protocol to a high-throughput leader-based DAG protocol and back, excelling in latency and complexity in both settings. During high-throughout, Morpheus pars with state-of-the-art DAG-based protocols, including Autobahn [15]. During low-throughput, Morpheus exhibits competitive complexity and lower latency than standard protocols such as PBFT [10] and Tendermint [8, 9], which in turn do not perform well during high-throughput. The key idea of Morpheus is that as long as blocks do not conflict (due to Byzantine behaviour, network delays, or high-throughput simultaneous production) it produces a forkless blockchain, promptly finalizing each block upon arrival. It assigns a leader only if one is needed to resolve conflicts, in a manner and with performance not unlike Autobahn.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Mathematics
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics
Date Deposited:	31 Oct 2025 14:27
Last Modified:	03 Nov 2025 12:27
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/130025

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