Sonic publicly announces a novel Consensus Protocol, asserting a potential 2x speed increase and a significant 68% reduction in memory usage.
In a groundbreaking development, Sonic, a leading blockchain platform, has unveiled SonicCS 2.0, an upgrade to its consensus protocol. This new system promises to set a new standard for efficiency and speed in DAG-based consensus protocols.
### Overlapping Elections: Accelerating Consensus
Unlike traditional blockchains that elect a single block leader sequentially, SonicCS 2.0 allows multiple elections to overlap. This revolutionary approach enables individual transaction updates to participate in several elections simultaneously, acting as both voters and leaders in parallel. This accelerates the consensus process, shortens transaction finality time, and streamlines the layered DAG structure into a faster, more resource-efficient process.
### Matrix-Based Voting Structure: Streamlined Vote Processing
SonicCS 2.0 employs a 0-1 matrix format to represent voting and aggregation data across election layers. This matrix-based approach compresses data efficiently, allowing the protocol to leverage vectorized CPU instructions (such as AVX2) for rapid computation of votes and aggregation results. The matrix structure supports real-time threshold checking and vote aggregation with minimal resource consumption. As a result, memory usage per epoch drops dramatically (from around 420MB to 135MB), freeing computing resources and enabling high-throughput validator nodes.
### The Power of Combination
The overlapping elections and matrix-based voting structures work together to reduce the path from transaction initiation to finality, double network speed, and cut memory usage by about 68%. This combination enhances parallelism in transaction ordering and leader election, diminishes computational strain on validators, and accelerates consensus confirmations, thereby significantly boosting the overall performance and scalability of the Sonic blockchain network.
### Validated Improvements
Performance tests on 200 mainnet epochs show SonicCS 2.0 delivers a consistent 2.04x speed boost. The protocol never lagged behind its predecessor and achieved a top speedup of 2.26x. More testing and performance benchmarks are expected to follow as the protocol rolls out.
Wu Blockchain has shared details of the upgrade, confirming that Sonic's team will integrate the new system into its upcoming client release. With faster transaction ordering and lower memory use, SonicCS 2.0 could revolutionize DAG-based consensus protocols.
Sources: [1] SonicCS 2.0 Whitepaper, Sonic Team, 2022. [2] SonicCS 2.0 Performance Test Results, Sonic Team, 2022. [3] SonicCS 2.0 Upgrade Announcement, Wu Blockchain, 2022.
In the SonicCS 2.0 upgrade, data-and-cloud-computing technology is utilized for rapid computation of votes and aggregation results through the leveraging of vectorized CPU instructions (such as AVX2), demonstrating Sonic's commitment to data efficiency in its data-and-cloud-computing strategy. The new consensus protocol, SonicCS 2.0, also incorporates technology that allows multiple elections to overlap, thereby enhancing the NSE (Network Speed) by double and cutting memory usage by about 68%, as confirmed by the performance tests in the SonicCS 2.0 Whitepaper.
