This talk introduces Mysticeti a byzantine consensus protocol with low-latency and high resource efficiency. It leverages a DAG based on Threshold Clocks and incorporates innovations in pipelining and multiple leaders to reduce latency in the steady state and under crash failures. Mysticeti is the first byzantine protocol to achieve WAN latency of 0.5s for consensus commit, at a throughput of over 50k TPS that matches the state-of-the-art. Additionally, and if time permits, this talk describes a variant of Mysticeti, called Mysticeti-FPC, that incorporates a fast commit path that has even lower latency by forgoing consensus whenever possible. Link: https://sonnino.com/papers/mysticeti.pdf

I received my PhD from University College London (UCL) advised by George Danezis and Jens Groth. During my PhD I co-founded chainspace.io, which built a scalable and privacy-preserving smart contract platform. Chainspace scales by sharding its state among sub-quorums of nodes and supports privacy-preserving smart contracts by separating the contract’s execution logic from its verification through zero-knowledge proofs. The company was built from several academic works such as chainspace, byzcuit, and coconut (the first three chapters of my PhD thesis). We were then acquired by Facebook (now named Meta) in February 2019. I then helped design the Novi wallet and Libra payment system. Designing Libra (later renamed Diem) required numerous research innovations such as the Jolteon consensus protocol, the Carousel leader election protocol, and the Twins testing framework. The project also led to the creation of the open-source and production-ready diem codebase that became the foundation of Aptos. While at Meta I also co-authored the FastPay consensus-less payment system (the last chapter of my PhD thesis), the Narwhal DAG-based mempool, and the Bullshark consensus protocol. I then left Meta in 2022 to commercialize these projects, branded as Sui. https://sonnino.com/