Alysson Bessani, LASIGE integrated researcher and Director, delivered a keynote talk at the 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA2025), on November 6, 2025, held in Lisboa.

The talk, entitled “Embracing the Dice: Playing with Quorums to Derive Efficient Blockchain Consensus,” addressed the excellent work carried out at LASIGE in decentralized and fault-tolerant distributed systems, within the Dependable and Secure Decentralized Systems (DS2) research line.

In the talk, Bessani presented new distributed consensus protocols that accept the risk of failure in very unlikely executions, but that are very efficient under reasonable practical adversaries. The key idea behind these protocols is to relinquish traditional quorum overlapping guarantees that underpin practical consensus and adopt weighted and probabilistic constructions.