The rapidly expanding blockchain ecosystem faces a critical interoperability crisis—evidenced by siloed total value locked and bridge losses. Existing interoperability solutions are trapped in a paradigm dilemma: centralized relays offer performance but introduce single points of failure, while decentralized relay-chains provide security but suffer from poor scalability and rigidity. To overcome these limitations, we introduce theHybrid Relay Architecture, a new decentralized interoperability paradigm that reconciles the efficiency of centralized relays with the security guarantees of decentralized systems via dynamic role stratification and probabilistic trust coordination. We instantiate this paradigm asCelestial, which realizes hybrid relaying through (1) a unified interchain data unit for coordination, (2) a geo-aware topology that enables adaptive role assignment, and (3) a proof of cross-chain transmission protocol that incentivizes honest node participation. Implemented in 12K+ LoC and evaluated across 90+ nodes spanning three continents,Celestialachieves 3,340 TPS with sub-600ms P99 latency, recovers from faults 6.4× faster than state-of-the-art systems, and reduces verification cost by 63% under adaptive attacks.

Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols are the core components of blockchain. In the process of improving the performance of BFT protocols, existing work faces the following three problems: 1) the binary dilemma between the leader’s performance bottleneck in star-based linear communication and compromised resilience in tree-based sublinear communication; 2) two- or three-round protocols restrict the phase number of one proposal, thereby limiting the number of concurrent proposals and causing high latency. 3) The fixed timeout makes the protocol sensitive to varying network delays. Therefore, this paper proposesCrackle, the first sector-based pipelined BFT protocol with a sublinear communication complexity, for a throughput improvement of consensus protocol with max resilience of$(\mathcal {N}\textrm {-} 1)/3$. We propose a sector-based communication mode to disseminate messages from the leader to a subset of replicas in each phase to accelerate consensus and split the traditional two-round protocol into$2\mathsf {\kappa }$phases to increase the basic pipeline scale. We refine the timer strategy so that the timeout$\Delta $is adjusted with the proposal submission to cope with the changing network environment. We then address two technical challenges: 1) to ensure Quorum Certificate (QC) validation, we design a$\mathit {voteMap} s$field within each block, and verify QC by the signature aggregation of$\mathit {voteMap} s$in continuous$\mathsf {\kappa }$phases; and 2) to achieve pipeline decoupling among shorter phases, we propose a vote-appending mechanism that relaxes the conditions for the leader to send new proposals. We provide comprehensive theoretical proof of the correctness ofCrackle, including safety and$\mathit{liveness}$. Moreover, we implementCracklebased on a public BFT framework and deploy it on 64 cloud servers. Real experimental results reveal that ourCrackleprotocol achieves up to 10.36x higher throughput and can dynamically adapt to network delay compared with state-of-the-art BFT protocols such as Kauri and Hotstuff.

The application scenarios of drone collaboration are rapidly expanding, such as the low-altitude economy and wildfire protection. Blockchain-based drone collaboration requires a consensus mechanism to ensure efficient and secure consistency among large-scale distributed nodes. However, the existing consensus mechanism has problems with poor fault tolerance of topology and rigid proposal concurrency. To this end, this paper proposes AirBFT, an efficient and robust consensus mechanism for large-scale drone collaboration. First, this paper designs a new four-layer network topology, using upper-member and lower-member communication, while ensuring the maximum 1/3 resilience and fanout of √N. Secondly, this paper proposes a dynamic pipelining algorithm to adjust the parallelism of proposals according to the real-time network status. Finally, this paper proposes a committee sampling technology based on the EigenTrust algorithm to reduce the impact of the malicious behavior of Byzantine nodes. Experiments based on the public consensus framework show that compared with Kauri and HotStuff, the proposed AirBFT reduces transaction confirmation delay by 58%, the throughput is increased by 1.9 times, and it can ensure efficient operation with a 1/3 Byzantine node ratio.