The paper Chasing Lightspeed Consensus: Fast Wide-Area Byzantine Replication with Mercury authored by LASIGE integrated members Alysson Bessani and Vinicius Cogo was awarded at the ACM/IFIP Middleware Conference 2024 in the beginning of December, 2024, at Hong Kong, China.

The paper, co-authored by Lívio Rodrigues (an ex-LASIGE researcher) and two researchers from Universities of Pasau (Germany) and Reykjavík (Iceland), presents and experimentally evaluates a new algorithm called Mercury, which enables Byzantine-tolerant replication on global-scale networks at the speed of light. More specifically, Mercury achieves transaction confirmation latencies smaller than the fastest replication protocol available running in a speed of light network (which does not exist in real world). This type of protocol can enable a new generation of blockchains and crypto currencies with end-trend transaction processing speeds of less than a tenth of second.

The Mercury paper was awarded as Best Paper Runner’s Up, as can be seen in the conference awards page.