Aptos achieves its high throughput and sub-second finality through Quorum Store , a sophisticated mempool protocol. Its core innovation is decoupling data dissemination from consensus. This eliminates a major bottleneck in traditional blockchains.
The Bottleneck Problem
In older systems, the leader broadcasts the entire block of raw transaction data to all validators. This makes the leader’s bandwidth a single bottleneck , limiting the network’s overall speed.
Quorum Store: Decentralized Data Delivery
Quorum Store introduces a parallel, decentralized approach:
- Decentralized Data Dissemination: Instead of waiting for a leader, all validators actively broadcast batches of raw transactions in parallel to all other validators . This distributes the heavy lifting.
- Proof of Availability (PoAv) Generation: Once a validator receives and stores a batch, it signs its metadata. When a quorum of signatures is gathered, a Proof of Availability (PoAv) is created. This is a lightweight cryptographic certificate (hash + signatures) that does NOT contain the raw transaction data itself , only proof of its availability.
- Lightweight Consensus: The consensus leader then proposes a block containing only these small PoAvs (metadata) . The consensus protocol focuses solely on ordering these lightweight proofs, making block proposals much smaller and faster.
Key Benefits
Quorum Store provides profound advantages:
- Throughput Increase: Offloads data dissemination, enabling significantly higher Transactions Per Second (TPS).
- Horizontal Scalability: As network load increases, more validators can contribute to parallel data dissemination, improving overall capacity.
- Lower Latency: Transactions become available faster, contributing to sub-second finality.
- Efficient Resource Utilization: All validators are actively engaged, leading to balanced resource use.
Aptos’s Quorum Store is a fundamental innovation that redefines how blockchain networks achieve high performance and scalability by intelligently decoupling data dissemination from consensus.
You can read more here