Federal Reserve Board research presents Heraclius Byzantine fault tolerant database achieving 110,000 operations per second on 256 nodes for payments use cases

The Federal Reserve Board published research introducing Heraclius, a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) key-value database system that could be extended for use in modern payments systems, to examine whether BFT designs can improve resiliency and security against a wider set of failure modes than commonly used distributed system architectures. The paper frames payment systems as critical infrastructure and notes that outages can have broader economic ripple effects, while existing designs often lack built-in defenses against failures such as malicious attacks and silent data corruption and instead rely on external preventative controls. Heraclius is described as a parallelizable, leader-based BFT architecture that executes transactions in parallel to support high transaction volumes. The paper analyzes protocol scalability, identifies bottlenecks and potential mitigations, and compares Heraclius’s properties with other database architectures used in payments infrastructure; a prototype implementation tested at up to 256 nodes reached 110 thousand operations per second with 0.2 seconds transaction latency.