Industrial Consultancy & Sponsored Research (IC&SR) , IIT Madras
Colosseum, A Scalable And Byzantine-fault Tolerant Consensus Mechanism For Permissioned Systems
Technology Category/Market
Category- Blockchain
Industry Classification:
Financial Services; Healthcare; Supply Chain and Logistics; Government and Public Sector
Applications:
Secure and scalable transactions for banking and stock exchanges; Managing sensitive patient data across distributed networks; Ensuring fault tolerance in distributed IoT ecosystems and Verifiable and tamper-proof transaction record
Market report:
The global blockchain market was valued at USD 42.29 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to $2346.01 billion by 2032 with a CAGR of 65.2%
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Problem Statement
- Byzantine failures in blockchain complicate system reliability and security, especially in financial, healthcare, and supply chain domains.
- Traditional permissioned blockchains rely on voting-based consensus, which assumes constant adversaries and suffers from high message complexity, leading to scalability issues and limited applications in high-demand scenarios.
- Further, conventional methods face challenges like network congestion, double-spending risks, high computational costs, and inefficient handling of adversaries, making them unsuitable for large-scale applications demanding high throughput.
- There is a need for a novel consensus mechanism to address Byzantine failures and improve system reliability and security for industries requiring secure, scalable, and efficient blockchain solutions.
Technology
- Colosseum uses a novel knockout tournament to select block proposers, leveraging a cryptographic Proof-of-Win for transparency and fault tolerance.
- Employs Converging Directed Acyclic Graph (CDAG) to enable simultaneous block additions, reducing conflicts and improving transaction finality.
- Adaptable configurations allow the system to scale efficiently with network size, as demonstrated by throughput results under varying conditions.
- Random validator assignment and independent verification mechanisms prevent tampering and unauthorized actions, enhancing trust in the system.
- Features like distributed time barriers and transaction bucketing ensure operational efficiency, even in large, diverse networks.
Key Features/Value Proposition
- Colosseum utilizes a knockout tournament to select block proposers, reducing complexity and ensuring fairness without assuming constant adversarial presence.
- The introduction of CDAG allows simultaneous block additions, addressing the bottlenecks in traditional blockchain and blockDAG structures.
- Efficient transaction bucketing and distributed time barriers minimize conflicts and ensure ledger consistency, critical for large-scale deployment.
- By leveraging Proof-of-Win (PoWin) certificates, the system ensures tamper-proof validation and restricts unauthorized actions, improving security.
- Dynamic pairing, random validator selection, and C-Block integration make the system resilient to targeted attacks, enhancing usability in diverse environments.
Questions about this Technology?
Contact for Licensing
Research Lab
Prof. Janakiram D
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Intellectual Property
- IITM IDF Ref 1869
- IN 564032 Patent Granted
- US 12,107,959 B2 Patent Granted
Technology Readiness Level
TRL 6
Technology demonstrated in relevant environment