The Byzantine Fault Tolerance Protocol (BFT) is no stranger to folks in the blockchain industry. In terms of the consensus in distributed networks, some nodes may behave dishonestly, which leads to the concept of Byzantine Fault Tolerance. Top projects such as Ethereum 2.0, Facebook’s Libra, and Cosmos have all adopted BFT-based protocols to reach network consensus. But the current BFT protocols are probably not the perfect solution.
On April 18th, Sperax team launched the BFT-based BDLS protocol, expected to further improve the security and performance of the BFT protocol.
At the same time, Sperax team announced the Bug Bounty Program. As long as developers find a new bug in Sperax, regardless of the severity level, they can receive SPA tokens worth 1000 USD upon verification by Sperax team.
BlockBeats interviewed Sperax team about the Bug Bounty Program, their reflection on the BFT protocol, and their future plans.
Q: How is the Bug Bounty Program going? Any bug submitted?
We started this bounty program last week, and it was well covered in the media and technology communities at home and abroad. We are very pleased to see active participation of developers around the world. Some developers have submitted bugs so far, and our engineers are working on the audit.
In addition, we have received many developers’ questions about the design of BDLS and its differences from other protocols. We have also prepared some articles to elaborate on BDLS, which will be published on our social media channels and Medium. So please stay tuned for more updates!
Q: Usually a rating model based on the severity of bugs can motivate developers to find the most difficult bugs. Why is there no such model for this program?
In fact, our team carefully reviewed the code with the external test team before the release of BDLS. We think any bug could affect the performance of the system. We want to encourage developers to contribute to the security of the consensus, so we decided to reward each bug finding with $ 1,000 regardless of the severity.
Q: Why did the team develop the BDLS protocol? Why do you think it is necessary?
Our research team analyzed the current BFT-based consensus protocols, including Cosmos’ Tendermint, Polkadot’s Grandpa, Ethereum’s Casper, etc., and found that none of them can guarantee network security.
Based on our constructive discussions with many projects, we summarized our results and published an academic paper Sperax: An Approach To Defeat Long Range Attacks In Blockchains. It was selected by the IEEE ’s top conference this year, 2020 IEEE International Symposium on Edge Computing Security and Blockchain (EdgeBlock 2020).
Our researchers will present it to the international academia at the Toronto Conference in the second half of 2020. We believe that a secure and efficient BFT consensus is still an important part of the underlying layer of Web3. That’s why we developed BDLS.
Q: Do you think the protocol is still the most urgent issue currently? Some people say that only applications will attract large-scale adoptions.
Our project started relatively late, right after the tide of the protocol layer in 2017 and 2018. So many people told us that “There is no future for a protocol layer project.”
Applications, like the traditional Internet, are generally accepted by ordinary users on a large scale, and must rely on the design of the protocol layer. The mass adoption of decentralized applications depends on the design of the protocol layer.
Enhancing the security and performance of the protocol enables large-scale application access usage and adoption now and in the future. Hence, we feel that the security and governance design of the protocol layer needs to be improved.
Q: What are the future plans for BDLS and Sperax?
BDLS is an innovative BFT consensus algorithm that features safety and liveness by presenting a mathematically proven secure BFT protocol which is resilient in open networks such as the Internet.
We contribute to the overall blockchain technology by sharing the code with the Web 3.0 community so that public chain projects or alliance chain projects can use BDLS to support the consensus module.
Our next goal is to launch the testnet.
Based on the BDLS consensus, our testnet will be compatible with Ethereum’s virtual machine as well.
We will support the decentralized applications of the Ethereum ecosystem and offer infrastructures with better performance.
Sperax is also collaborating with financial service institutions to integrate traditional finance into the system, so that developers can not only develop products for blockchain users, but also serve the broad internet users.
Hong Kong Monetary Authority has only issued virtual bank licenses to less than 10 reputable financial institutions. And we are currently collaborating with a Hong Kong licensed virtual bank.
As mentioned in our mission, we hope that Sperax can serve as the trusted infrastructure for a decentralized economy. Sperax’s testnet, which is based on the BDLS protocol, will go live soon. Developers and users can experience how BDLS distinguishes from the other protocols upon launch.