SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency ‘ICON’ unveils a new novel consensus algorithm ‘LFT2’

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: South Korea's largest cryptocurrency 'ICON' unveils a new novel consensus algorithm 'LFT2' By ICON Newsletter • Issue #14 • View online

The largest cryptocurrency project from South Korea 'ICON (ICX)' has officially unveiled Loop Fault Tolerance 2.0 (LFT2), a new consensus algorithm that improves the performance of blockchains, after 3 years of research and development. LFT2 white paper is published on Github. This is the first time a South Korean team successfully innovated on the most important component of blockchain technology. Cryptocurrencies are powered by distributed systems that depend on consensus algorithms to verify all transactions in a trustless manner. Bitcoin and Ethereum, two of the most popular cryptocurrencies today, use Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus, which has been criticized for its slowness and high energy consumption. Various types of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus have been popular amongst newer cryptocurrencies such as EOS (Pipelined) and Cosmos (Tendermint). LFT2 has proven performance improvements over PBFT in the areas of scalability and network bandwidth without compromising two fundamental requirements - safety and liveness.  In simplest terms, PBFT-based algorithms require a large number of message exchanges to reach consensus for one block. LFT2 has reduced the message traffic that is needed for the PBFT-based consensus algorithms from 3 to 2 steps without compromising safety and liveness. By reducing the network load, voting can be done faster, improving overall throughput and reducing network latency.

LFT2 has been audited by the KAIST University research team that discovered problems with Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) consensus algorithm used by Stellar, a top 15 cryptocurrency, in a 2019 published report Is Stellar As Secure As You Think?. For LFT2, KAIST University team wrote, "We analyze a consensus algorithm called LFT2, which is used by a blockchain system, ICON. We prove that LFT2 satisfies safety and liveness, where a certain assumption is required to prove liveness." The full audit report 'Analysis of LFT2' is published on arXiv.org.  "We're proud of our accomplishments with LFT2. This alone clearly shows why ICON is the top Korean project. But, we still have a lot of work ahead of us," said Min Kim, ICON Foundation Council Member and Founder of the ICON Project. "ICON was once dubbed the 'Korean Ethereum'. We've come a long way since then. LFT2 is hard evidence that ICON and Korea now have the technical prowess to innovate head-to-head with global blockchain projects like Ethereum." Founded in August 2017, ICON is the largest and most well-known cryptocurrency project from South Korea. ICON aims to build a hybrid blockchain network that bridges autonomous online communities and real-world private enterprises. ICON is currently the 8th most utilized blockchain and fully decentralized with 120 validators from around the world. LFT2 is scheduled to be implemented later this year.

Medium Blog: LFT2 Consensus Algorithm LFT2 is based on the PBFT consensus model, with a proprietary algorithm to emerge commit messages into a 2-step consensus process. This alleviates communication overhead and complexity of PBFT's 3-step consensus process, leading to a lightweight and highly performant blockchain consensus algorithm.  medium.com  •  Share

White Paper: LFT2 In this paper, we present LFT2, a novel PBFT based consensus algorithm with a reduced 2-step consensus process. LFT2 is a leader-based Byzantine fault-tolerant replication protocol for a partially synchronous model. github.com  •  Share

Audit Report: Analysis of LFT2 We analyze a consensus algorithm called LFT2, which is used by a blockchain system, ICON. We first formulate the LFT2 consensus algorithm and then analyze safety and liveness, which can be considered as the most important properties in distributed consensus system. arxiv.org  •  Share

GitHub Code: LFT2 LFT2 is a new consensus algorithm inspired by PBFT. It improves TPS with reducing a pair of votes compared to PBFT when nodes make a consensus. A concept, 'Candidate' has been introduced for keeping safety. github.com  •  Share

Cointelegraph: South Korea's Largest Crypto Unveils New Consensus Algorithm South Korea's largest public blockchain project, ICON (ICX), announced its new Loop Fault Tolerance 2.0 (LFT 2.0) consensus algorithm on April 8. The new algorithm claims to make performance improvements in scalability and network bandwidth over the popular Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus types, without compromising security. cointelegraph.com  •  Share

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