Cadence: Extreme Pipelining with Multiple Concurrent Proposers
2026-07-02 • Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
AI summaryⓘ
The authors present Cadence, a method for agreeing on new blocks in a blockchain that can finalize blocks very quickly and handle failure by some participants. Instead of waiting for one block to finish before starting the next, Cadence works on many blocks at once independently, making it very fast. Multiple proposers suggest blocks at the same time, which stops censorship and unfair manipulation in the short term. The authors designed new protocols called Chorus and Conductor to manage this process and proved their approach is safe and reliable. In tests with many validators, Cadence finalized blocks in just over 200 milliseconds on average.
Byzantine fault tolerancemulti-proposer consensusblock finalizationpartial synchronyfast-path latencyconsensus protocolblockchaincensorship resistanceslot consensuspipelining
Authors
Fatima Elsheimy, Mohammad Mussadiq Jalalzai, Tobias Klenze, Jovan Komatovic, Mike Setrin, Victor Shoup, Kushal Babel, Lioba Heimbach, Jason Milionis
Abstract
We present Cadence, a Byzantine fault-tolerant multi-proposer consensus protocol with arbitrarily low block intervals, optimal resilience, and optimal fast-path latency. Cadence divides time into equally spaced slots, one block per slot, each finalized in its own consensus instance. Blocks do not build directly on their predecessor, so instances run independently and none waits for an earlier block to finish or propagate; we call this extreme pipelining, decoupling the block interval from network latency. Cadence also removes the single-leader monopoly over transaction inclusion and ordering: under multiple concurrent proposers (MCP), several validators propose for each block, and it guarantees that, under synchrony, a transaction a correct proposer includes cannot be censored or deferred (short-term censorship resistance), and that no proposer can craft its proposal in reaction to the others' (hiding). To realize extreme pipelining, we introduce a general framework that turns any one-shot consensus meeting our slot-consensus specification into a multi-shot protocol. We instantiate it for MCP with two protocols of our own: Chorus, a slot consensus whose fast path finalizes a block in an optimal three rounds, with speculative finality one round earlier, and Conductor, an orchestrator that opens slots at an even cadence, more slowly under asynchrony to keep open slots bounded. To our knowledge, Cadence is the first MCP protocol to provide short-term censorship resistance and hiding at the fast-path latency of single-leader consensus. We prove safety, liveness, censorship resistance, and hiding under partial synchrony with optimal resilience (n = 3f+1). In simulation over Monad's 200 validators with five proposers per slot, finalization averages 219 ms (167 ms to speculative finality); at a 100 ms block interval a transaction waits on average 50 ms to enter a proposal.