The Journey of Building Global-Scale Sustainable Blockchain Fabric

Abstract: The inception of Bitcoin and blockchain has renewed the vision of a democratic and decentralized computational paradigm, that is, to ingrain integrity, transparency, and accountability into the very fabric of the computational model. These fundamental concepts and the technologies behind them–a generic ledger-based data model, cryptographically ensured data integrity and transparent and accountable consensus-based replication–prove to be a powerful and inspiring combination. Arguably, the resilient consensus protocol is at the heart of this paradigm shift. To this end, we share the story behind our (resilient) journey in building a consensus-based blockchain called Apache ResilientDB (Incubating). In this presentation, we aim to provide an insightful overview of the core structure of the consensus protocols. We will further offer the intuitions behind our ongoing work, including the speculative consensus model, concurrent consensus with a wait-free property, geo-scale meta-consensus, consensus with weaker consistency models and isolation semantics, as well as a variety of sharding and cross-chain protocols through our novel reliable communication primitives.

Bio: Mohammad Sadoghi is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Davis. Formerly, he was an Assistant Professor at Purdue University and a Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 2013. He leads the ExpoLab research group with the mission to pioneer a resilient data platform at scale under our flagship project called Apache ResilientDB (Incubating), a distributed ledger centered around a democratic and decentralized computational model that further aims to unify secure transactional and real-time analytical processing (L-Store). He envisions ResilientDB to serve as a platform to foster “creativity.” He co-founded the blockchain spinoff, Moka Blox LLC, as the ResilientDB spinoff. He has over 100 publications in leading database conferences/journals and 36 filed U.S. patents. His ACM Middleware’18 entitled “QueCC: A Queue-oriented, Control-free Concurrency Architecture” won the Best Paper Award; his paper “Dissecting BFT Consensus: In Trusted Components we Trust!” won the Best Paper Award at EuroSys’23; and his paper “The Bedrock of Byzantine Fault Tolerance: A Unified Platform for BFT Protocols Analysis, Implementation, and Experimentation” won the Outstanding Paper Award at NSDI’24. He has co-authored several books, “Transaction Processing on Modern Hardware” and “Fault-tolerant Distributed Transactions on Blockchain,” both published by Morgan & Claypool Synthesis Lectures on Data Management and a book published by Foundations and Trends® in Databases, entitled “Consensus in Data Management: From Distributed Commit to Blockchain.”