Gatling: Rapid-Fire Consensus from Parallel Composition

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 16 Jun 2026] Gatling: Rapid-Fire Consensus from Parallel Composition Giulia Scaffino, Max Resnick, Joachim Neu Consensus protocols form the core of blockchains and other replicated state machines, ensuring that all correct nodes process the same totally ordered log of input transactions. In fault-free executions, performance is driven by the good-case transaction latency -- the time between a transaction becoming known to all nodes and its confirmation by the consensus protocol -- which depends on both how frequently proposals are made and, once made, how quickly they are confirmed. While prior work has established tight lower bounds on confirmation latency that modern protocols already achieve, it remains open whether the inter-proposal time can be further reduced below the state-of-the-art of one network delay. We introduce Gatling, an atomic broadcast protocol that achieves arbitrarily small inter-proposal times under rotating leader schedules; in particular, smaller than the network delay. Gatling runs multiple parallel instances of a black-box atomic broadcast protocol and staggers their proposal schedules to generate proposals in faster succession than state-of-the-art protocols. A deterministic interleaving rule merges the outputs of these instances into a single global log. We analyze the effects of head-of-line blocking caused by crashed leaders, and derive Gatling's optimal number of parallel instances. We further study the impact of Gatling on predictable validity and present two variants that retain this property. Finally, our experiments confirm that Gatling can be used with off-the-shelf component protocols to achieve low latency without fine-tuning the component protocol for minimum latency. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC) Cite as: arXiv:2606.18220 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.18220v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.18220 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Giulia Scaffino [view email] [v1] Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:48:47 UTC (387 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.DC References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)