The design, architecture and performance of the Tendermint Blockchain Network

Abstract

Tendermint is the replication engine at the core of Cosmos, a network of proof-of-stake blockchains. In the lifespan of blockchains, Cosmos and Tendermint are mature technologies, currently used by more than a hundred businesses and deployed by hundreds of nodes. The system was designed to provide flexible deployment despite heterogeneous environments, scale performance with the number of nodes, and tolerate misbehaving participants. In this practical experience report, we overview Tendermint's main design goals and architecture, and present a detailed performance evaluation of the system in a realistic environment. We report results from a geographically distributed environment with up to 128 nodes, including failure-free executions and fail-prone scenarios, with both crash and Byzantine failures.