ICON (ICX) blockchain announces a new consensus algorithm

• South Korea’s blockchain project ICON has unveiled its Loop Fault Tolerance 2.0 consensus algorithm.
• The algorithm enables faster voting and reduces network latency.

South Korea-based largest public blockchain project ICON (ICX) recently announced its Loop Fault Tolerance 2.0 (LFT 2.0) consensus algorithm. The algorithm aims to improve scalability and network bandwidth over the popular Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus types without compromising security.

After three years of research and development, the LFT 2.0 white paper was recently published on Github. Notably, this is the first time a South Korean team has successfully innovated on this aspect of blockchain technology. PBFT-based algorithms require a large number of message exchanges to reach consensus on a new block. The new algorithm decreases the message traffic from two to three steps. This enables faster voting and reduces network latency.

A team at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has independently audited the algorithm for security. Speaking about LFT 2.0, the KAIST team said:

We analyzed a consensus algorithm called LFT 2.0, which is used by a blockchain system, ICON. We proved that LFT 2.0 satisfies safety and liveness, where a certain assumption is required to prove liveness.