MonadBFT can provide a more predictable and stable blockchain environment by resisting tail-forking.

Author: Harvey C

Category Labs officially releases the next-generation consensus protocol of @monad_xyz — MonadBFT. It is designed for high speed (up to 10,000 transactions per second), security, and sub-second finality, ensuring that the network can reach consensus on valid blocks more efficiently.

Let’s explore the features of MonadBFT👇

💡Core Highlights of MonadBFT💡

MonadBFT is based on the proven pipelined HotStuff protocol and possesses the following unique attributes:

Tail-forking resistance: Effectively prevents block reorganization and delays that disrupt the network.

Single-round speculative finality: Accelerates transaction processing and reduces latency.

Optimistic responsiveness: No artificial delays, fully relying on actual network speed.

Linear complexity under the "happy path": Still effectively scalable as the number of validators increases.

✅Core Innovation: Tail-forking Resistance

What is tail-forking?

Tail-forking occurs when a block that has received a supermajority of votes is abandoned and replaced by a newly proposed block. This is not strictly a "hard fork," but it causes reorganization and chaos on the chain. For PoS, this is a commonly overlooked but very serious issue.

Why does tail-forking cause harm?

Here is an example from the current testnet: Validator Valerie proposed a valid block. However, the next validator, Will, went offline, causing Valerie's proposed block to not progress, even though Valerie did nothing wrong.

In many pipelined systems, the next proposer needs to package votes for the previous block (Valerie's block). If the next proposer is interrupted or unable to execute, then the previous block will also fail.

This leads to two problems:

Unfairness: Honest validators like Valerie lose rewards or fees due to the mistakes of others.

Poor user experience: Some applications experience rollbacks when displaying the transition state between "Voted" (about 500ms) and "Finalized" (about 1s) if tail-forking occurs, which is especially detrimental for high-frequency trading (HFT), gaming, and real-time applications!

Tail-forking can also be maliciously exploited, leading to MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) risks.

An online and profit-seeking validator may collude with the next proposer to deliberately time out the previous proposal, causing the original block to be abandoned, and then issue a new proposal to steal transactions and MEV from the abandoned block, similar to "selfish mining," which can lead to network instability or even disruption.

✅The Solution of MonadBFT

MonadBFT ensures that any block that receives sufficient votes (supermajority or honest majority) will eventually be finalized. How does it achieve this?

Timeout messages contain information about the latest voted block.

If the next proposer finds that the previous block has not yet been finalized, they must re-propose that block instead of allowing it to be abandoned.

In the previous example, if Valerie proposed a block and Will went offline, the next proposer, Xander, would discover through the timeout message that Valerie's block has not yet been finalized:

Xander first re-proposes Valerie's block.

Then Xander proposes their own block.

This ensures that:

Valerie's block is not discarded in vain,

The efforts and rewards of honest validators are protected.

➡️Summary

MonadBFT brings the following benefits by resisting tail-forking:

🛡️ Protects the work and rewards of honest validators.

⛓️ Provides a more predictable and stable blockchain environment.

💸 Suppresses malicious MEV behavior that exploits reorganization.

⚡ Enhances the security of speculative finality and improves user experience.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg of MonadBFT's many powerful features. We will continue to explore more exciting characteristics in future shares!

Want to learn more about MonadBFT?

📄 Read the blog: https://category.xyz/blogs/monadbft-fast-responsive-fork-resistant-streamlined-consensus

🔬 Check the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20692

Stay tuned for more exciting content!

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