We are delighted to release our new consensus white paper, Cerberus; a blueprint of how to build a scalable, decentralised, public network that can support and connect billions of users.

Unlike traditional public ledgers (Bitcoin/Ethereum/Algorand etc), which treat consensus operations like a single lane of traffic, Cerberus creates a multi-lane superhighway, capable of processing massive numbers of transactions in parallel. Through the Cerberus consensus protocol, we are tackling one of the most pressing issues facing the blockchain industry, that of scalability.

Cerberus achieves this incredible feat by using an innovative approach to sharding. Sharding is the technique commonly used to break up huge databases into smaller, more manageable chunks. Cerberus uses a pre-sharded data structure so large that it could store the entirety of Google’s data in 0.5byte chunks. This fixed, pre-sharded data structure groups together related transactions and operations and ungroups unrelated transactions and operations across 18.4 quintillion shards. The result is virtually unbound parallel throughput.

“Cerberus represents a new generation of consensus protocols, designed and built around a highly sharded data structure enabling unprecedented levels of scale for a distributed ledger. We are excited to be testing Cerberus as part of our work at ExpoLab and see how it performs in real-world environments.”

Mohammad Sadoghi, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, UC Davis, Head of ExpoLab

Unlike other blockchains that need multiple confirmations before something can be considered trustworthy, Cerberus reaches finality within five seconds, creating an immutable record almost instantly after the transaction has been submitted. This makes sure that Cerberus delivers not just scale, but speed that can be relied upon as well. In Greek mythology Cerberus guards the Underworld, on Radix it guards the history of the ledger!

Read the full whitepaper here