Consensus

Specification of the consensus protocol implemented in CometBFT.

Contents

• Consensus Paper - Latex paper on arxiv describing the Tendermint consensus algorithm, adopted in CometBFT, with proofs of safety and termination.
• Time - How the timestamp in a CometBFT block header is produced in a Byzantine Fault Tolerant manner
• Creating Proposal - How a proposer creates a block proposal for consensus
• Light Client Protocol - A protocol for light weight consensus verification and syncing to the latest state
• Signing - Rules for cryptographic signatures produced by validators.
• Write Ahead Log - Write ahead log used by the consensus state machine to recover from crashes.

There is also a stale markdown description of the consensus state machine (TODO update this).