zeekayandHanzo Dev 1581396c44 fix(engine): remember the accepted position before finality becomes visible
handleVote routes a vote for a block that is no longer pending but IS in
finalizedByCert to attestFinalizedVote, which resolves the signed position through
lookupAcceptedPos. applyBranchFinalization sets finalizedByCert and drops the pending
block; rememberAcceptedPos ran later still, inside promoteQuasar. Between those two
points the tap was OPEN and the position ABSENT, so a vote arriving there took the
finalized path, missed the lookup, and returned in silence.

That vote is not recoverable. Accept votes are solicited once and promoteQuasar does no
retroactive promotion, so losing the 2/3-th one leaves the height Nova-only PERMANENTLY:
settlement never exports it, and FinalityStatus reports Degraded with a responsive stake
below the truth — a fleet with 4 of 5 up and all four voting reads back as 0.6 on a live
consumer surface. The window widens under CPU contention, which is where it surfaced, as
the source of the export-liveness flake fixed in f84579ed.

The write moves to before applyBranchFinalization, so the record exists before anything
can observe the block as finalized, and leaves promoteQuasar with one job. A later
VM.Accept failure cannot make it lie: attestFinalizedVote is reachable only for a block
finalizedByCert actually holds.

TestAcceptedPos_RememberedBeforeFinalityIsVisible pins the ordering without needing a
race — the VM's Accept runs inside the same finalization step, so probing lookupAccepted
Pos from Accept observes exactly the interval that used to be empty. It FAILS with the
write moved back.

Also in this commit, from the same review:

  - The no-cert-at-height branch gets its own log at Debug. It was sharing the
    "unreadable" line and reporting errNoCertAtHeight in a field named getBlockError,
    which is self-contradictory, and firing at Error on what is the ORDINARY case: the
    steer target is normally the build tip, which sits above the frontier by definition.

  - The FourOfFive gate keeps a direct quasarTip() read. Asserting only at blk's height
    let a frontier whose canonical nobody certified pass, and that shape is producible:
    SyncQuasarFrontier is a SECOND writer that seeds the frontier from the VM's durable
    export record with no Nova-ledger check and accepts an empty canonical. The gate now
    asserts chain membership AND no conflicting canonical at blk's height.

  - waitForExportFrontier advanced its height cursor while leaving parentID behind on a
    failed convergence, so every later iteration built on a stale parent and a real
    export stall was reported as unconvergeable noise. It now stops at the first
    non-converging height.

  - Corrected in the comments: the Nova cert freezes at NovaQuorum(5)=3, and alpha does
    not gate cert assembly at all. f84579ed's message said "the bare alpha=4 without 2/3",
    which is arithmetically impossible — prodParams5 sets alpha=4 and twoThirdsCount(5)
    is also 4 — and sends the next reader down a dead end.

Co-authored-by: Hanzo Dev <[email protected]>
2026-08-08 07:26:13 -07:00
2026-06-28 20:35:53 -07:00

consensus

Lux Consensus

Lux is not merely adding post-quantum signatures to a chain; it defines a hybrid finality architecture for DAG-native consensus, with protocol-agnostic threshold lifecycle, post-quantum threshold sealing, and cross-chain propagation of Horizon finality.

See LP-105 §Claims and evidence for the canonical claims/evidence table and the ten architectural commitments — single source of truth.

CI Status Go Version

Quasar Family of Consensus

Quasar is the consensus engine for the Lux network. It provides unified consensus for linear chains (P-Chain, C-Chain) and DAG chains (X-Chain) with post-quantum finality via three independent cryptographic signing paths.

Sub-Protocols

Protocol Role Package
Photon K-of-N committee selection via Fisher-Yates sampling with luminance-weighted reputation protocol/photon
Wave Per-round threshold voting with FPC (Fast Probabilistic Consensus) protocol/wave
Focus Confidence accumulation: beta consecutive successes = local finality protocol/focus
Nova Linear chain consensus mode (P-Chain, C-Chain) -- wraps Ray protocol/nova
Nebula DAG consensus mode (X-Chain) -- wraps Field protocol/nebula
Prism DAG geometry: frontiers, cuts, uniform peer sampling protocol/prism
Horizon DAG order-theory: reachability, LCA, transitive closure, skip lists protocol/horizon
Flare DAG certificate/skip detection via 2f+1 quorum protocol/flare
Ray Linear chain finality driver: Wave + Focus + Sink protocol/ray
Field DAG finality driver: Wave + safe-prefix commit protocol/field
Quasar BLS + Pulsar + ML-DSA threshold signing, epoch management protocol/quasar

Signing Modes

Each cryptographic layer is independently toggleable:

Mode Layers Use Case
BLS-only BLS12-381 threshold Fastest classical consensus
BLS + ML-DSA BLS + FIPS 204 ML-DSA-65 Dual with PQ identity proof
BLS + Pulsar BLS + Ring-LWE 2-round threshold Dual with PQ threshold proof
BLS + Pulsar + ML-DSA All three in parallel Full Quasar (triple mode)

IsTripleMode() returns true when all three paths are configured. TripleSignRound1 runs BLS + Pulsar + ML-DSA signing in parallel goroutines.

PQ Mode Selection (Configurable)

The active mode is selectable at runtime via config.PQMode or the CONSENSUS_PQ_MODE env var. Defined in config/pq_mode.go:

Mode Env value Maps to wire policy
BLSOnly bls PolicyQuorum
BLSPlusMLDSA bls-mldsa PolicyPQ
BLSPlusCorona bls-rt PolicyPZ
BLSPlusGroth16 bls-z PolicyQuantum (placeholder)
TripleQuantum triple PolicyQuantum

Run bench/pq_modes_bench_test.go for measured per-mode signing / aggregation / verify costs and cert sizes. Storage and cert size trade-offs:

Mode Sign Agg Verify Cert Storage 10K
bls 312 µs 8.6 ms 714 µs 123 B 1.17 MB
bls-mldsa 369 µs 8.5 ms 3.4 ms 69 KB 665 MB
bls-rt 39 ms 3.3 s 1.6 ms 33 KB 318 MB
triple 40 ms 3.3 s 4.3 ms 102 KB 981 MB

Pulsar / triple include the full 2-round Pulsar threshold protocol (github.com/luxfi/pulsar/threshold — Pulsar is Lux's variant with DKG2 and Pulsar-SHA3 hash suite). Production parameters M=8, N=7, LogN=8 (ring degree 256), Q=2^48-ish: classical 2^142, quantum 2^130. Cert-size floor of ~33 KB is set by the (C, Z, Delta) ring polynomials; protocol/quasar/cert_size_compare_test.go measures and verifies this.

Architecture

consensus/
  protocol/
    photon/       Committee selection (Emitter + Luminance)
    wave/         Threshold voting + FPC
      fpc/        Fast Probabilistic Consensus selector
    focus/        Confidence counter (beta tracker)
    prism/        DAG cuts, frontiers, uniform sampling
    horizon/      DAG reachability, LCA, skip lists
    flare/        DAG cert/skip classification (2f+1)
    ray/          Linear chain driver (Nova uses this)
    field/        DAG finality driver (Nebula uses this)
    nova/         Linear chain consensus mode
    nebula/       DAG consensus mode
    chain/        Block interface primitives
    quasar/       BLS + Pulsar + ML-DSA threshold signing
  engine/         Consensus engine (Chain, DAG, PQ wrappers)
  core/           Core types, DAG structures
  types/          Block, Vote, Config, Bag
  config/         Parameter presets (single, local, testnet, mainnet)
  runtime/        VM wiring (chain IDs, validators, logging)
  pkg/wire/       Wire protocol credentials (ML-DSA-44/65/87 + BLS + Ed25519)
  bench/          Benchmarks
  version/        Re-exports github.com/luxfi/version

Consensus Flow

Linear Chains (Nova)

Photon (select committee) -> Wave (threshold vote) -> Focus (count beta) -> Ray (decide) -> Sink

DAG Chains (Nebula)

Photon (select committee) -> Wave (threshold vote per frontier vertex)
  -> Flare (cert/skip) -> Horizon (safe prefix) -> Field (commit ordered prefix) -> Committer

Quasar PQ Finality

After consensus decision, the Quasar signing layer produces threshold certificates:

  1. BLS: single-round threshold share via crypto/threshold
  2. Pulsar: 2-round Ring-LWE threshold via luxfi/corona/threshold
  3. ML-DSA-65: single-round FIPS 204 identity signature

All three run in parallel. A block is quantum-final when all configured certificate layers are valid.

Key Hierarchy

Layer Key Type Purpose
Node-ID Ed25519 P2P transport auth
Validator-BLS BLS12-381 Classical finality votes
Validator-PQ Pulsar (Ring-LWE) PQ finality shares
Validator-ID ML-DSA-65 (FIPS 204) PQ identity attestation
Wallet (EVM) secp256k1 User transaction signatures
Wallet (X-Chain) secp256k1 UTXO locking

Quick Start

import "github.com/luxfi/consensus"

chain := consensus.NewChain(consensus.DefaultConfig())

ctx := context.Background()
if err := chain.Start(ctx); err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}
defer chain.Stop()

block := &consensus.Block{
    ID:       consensus.NewID(),
    ParentID: consensus.GenesisID,
    Height:   1,
    Payload:  []byte("Hello, Lux!"),
}
if err := chain.Add(ctx, block); err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}

Configuration

// Auto-configure based on validator count
params := consensus.GetConfig(21) // mainnet defaults

// Or use presets
consensus.SingleValidatorParams() // 1 node, dev
consensus.LocalParams()           // 5 nodes, local
consensus.TestnetParams()         // 11 nodes, testnet
consensus.MainnetParams()         // 21 nodes, production

Benchmarks

Measured on Apple M1 Max:

Component Operation Time/Op
Wave Vote round 3.38 us
Photon K-of-N selection 3.03 us
Luminance Brightness update 72 ns

ZAP wire protocol (measured, bench/):

Configuration Throughput
Single connection 114K TPS
20 parallel connections 376K TPS
50 conns + batch 1000 20.26M TPS

Testing

GOWORK=off go test ./...
GOWORK=off go test -bench=. ./bench/

Security Model

  1. Pre-quantum: Attacker must corrupt >= 1/3 stake to fork
  2. Q-day (BLS broken): Lattice certificates prevent unsafe finalization
  3. Post-quantum: Security rests on Module-LWE (Pulsar) + Module-LWE/SIS (ML-DSA)

License

BSD 3-Clause. See LICENSE.

S
Description
Quasar consensus engine: Go implementations of consensus protocols for the Lux Network.
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