{"ID":2839524,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15361","arxiv_id":"2511.15361","title":"BlueBottle: Fast and Robust Blockchains through Subsystem Specialization","abstract":"Blockchain consensus faces a trilemma of security, latency, and decentralization. High-throughput systems often require a reduction in decentralization or robustness against strong adversaries, while highly decentralized and secure systems tend to have lower performance. We present BlueBottle, a two-layer consensus architecture. The core layer, BB-Core, is an n=5f+1 protocol that trades some fault tolerance for a much lower finality latency with a medium-sized core validator set. Our experiments show that BB-Core reduces latency by 20-25% in comparison to Mysticeti. The guard layer, BB-Guard, provides decentralized timestamping, proactive misbehavior detection in BB-Core, and a synchronous recovery path. When it observes equivocations or liveness failures in the core -- while tolerating up to f\u003c3n/5 faulty nodes in the primary layer -- guard validators disseminate evidence, agree on misbehaving parties for exclusion or slashing, and either restart the core protocol (for liveness violations) or select a canonical fork (for safety violations). Together, these layers enable optimistic sub-second finality at high throughput while maintaining strong safety and liveness under a mild synchrony assumption.","short_abstract":"Blockchain consensus faces a trilemma of security, latency, and decentralization. High-throughput systems often require a reduction in decentralization or robustness against strong adversaries, while highly decentralized and secure systems tend to have lower performance. We present BlueBottle, a two-layer consensus arc...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15361","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15361v1","authors":"[\"Preston Vander Vos\",\"Alberto Sonnino\",\"Giorgos Tsimos\",\"Philipp Jovanovic\",\"Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias\"]","published":"2025-11-19T11:42:43Z","proceeding":"cs.DC","tasks":"[\"cs.DC\",\"cs.CR\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}