Presenting Tendermint: Idiosyncrasies, Weaknesses, and Good Practices

Abstract

In this paper, we present Tendermint: a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) application-based blockchain. We show that Tendermint promotes another perception of blockchain programming. Unlike Ethereum which is a blockchain holding many applications, Tendermint proposes to have one application per blockchain. We discuss the idiosyncrasies of Tendermint and how it could, potentially, ease blockchain programming and improve performance. We finish by showing weaknesses of Tendermint, good practices to adopt to hinder security attacks when handling Tendermint nodes, and some potential adjustments in the IBC protocol - an interoperability protocol designed for Tendermint. Our goal is to introduce Tendermint by showing its main characteristics over traditional blockchain platforms such as Bitcoin or Ethereum.