Overview
HotStuff is a modern BFT consensus protocol that improves upon pBFT and Tendermint. It was developed by researchers at VMware and is used as the basis for the consensus mechanism in projects like Aptos and the originally planned Facebook Libra (Diem).
Key Innovation
HotStuff introduces a 'three-phase' voting structure that simplifies the communication between nodes. Unlike pBFT, where every node must talk to every other node, in HotStuff, nodes primarily communicate with the leader, significantly reducing the network overhead.
Benefits
- Linear Complexity: The number of messages scales linearly with the number of nodes, making it more scalable than older BFT protocols.
- Pipelining: Allows multiple blocks to be in different stages of the consensus process simultaneously, increasing throughput.