Cardano’s Ouroboros Block Propagation within 5 secs and block size increase on 1st Dec 2021

Part of Cardano Fans mission is constant education for all of you, bring content in most digestible form.

Today let’s talk about 5 sec block propagation times. As you know in coming days (1st Dec) IOHK will increase e.g. block size by 12.5%. It is first iteration of scaling.

Slow and steady wins the race: network evolution for network growth - IOHK Blog

Increasing block size has to be done carefully because Cardano’s Ouroboros protocol has to propagate blocks in the network within 5 secs.

If you look at CRFA’s propagation graphs from pooltool.io you will see:

Cardano PoolTool

Left: how fast CRFA propagates blocks, right: how fast CRFA received blocks

A lot of stake pools are very similar, notice that it is less than 730 ms for CRFA at the moment on 65kb blocks (also many other stake pools have it), in computer science we call it “tail latency” or in extreme cases 99% percentile of latency.

So when some blockchain XYZ tells you that they can do a round trip through the globe within 1 sec on relatively large blocks… you should really question this… how is it possible?

Don’t believe what you read, analyse, reflect and ask unbiased experts (super hard these days).