This project is a JVM implementation of the Swirlds Hashgraph by Leemon Baird - a fair, fast, replicated, Byzantine state machine.
Once it reaches maturity, HashgraphMachine is intended to be a correct, performant and reusable implementation of the consensus protocol.
Please, be warned that this project is in a very early, proof-of-concept stage. Both APIs and implementation can and will change without notice.
Swirlds Hashgraph is fair, fast, replicated, Byzantine consensus algorithm, which can be used to implement distributed state machines.
Key properties of Hashgraph, which make it a very powerful tool for building real-world, large scale distributed systems (f.e. databases) include:
- Byzantine fault tolerancy, that is an ability to tolerate both classic node failures and network partitions as well as malicious, adversarial nodes - as long as at least ~2/3 of all peers are available and conforming.
- No single point of failure due to a leaderless approach to arriving at consensus.
- Scalability, peformance and energy efficiency due to a novel use of gossip protocol enabling the concept of virtual voting, which results in a very limited utilization of both network bandwidth and processing power.
For more detailed description, please consult the whitepaper: http://www.swirlds.com/downloads/SWIRLDS-TR-2016-01.pdf
//TODO: consider elaborating more
//TODO: write down specs of the implementation and APIs
//TODO: document architecture once there is some ;)