BFTE is a BFT consensus engine. A permissioned p2p blockchain to drive BFT applications in federated setup, including financial (Bitcoin) domains.
BFTE in its current form is a research project on alternative design/implementation of a Fedimint-like system. While the very-long term goals and supported use-cases could be similar to Fedimint, it has a luxury of not worrying about immediate practical application, enabling focus on parts and goals that the author (dpc) finds most promising and interesting.
BFTE steals as much as possible from Fedimint, while doing things differently where it seems to make sense.
Fedimint started as a Bitcoin Ecash Mint solution, with a side-goal/need of building a general purpose consensus engine. BFTE stars with a goal of building as good as possible general purpose consensus engine first, with an ability to support Bitcoin/cryptography applications like Ecash Mints "maybe one day".
Things like Bitcoin and Lightning Network support are a big and difficult tasks in itself, with large and complex integrations and ever evolving ecosystem, with a huge expectations on stability and robustness.
BFTE can just let Fedimint chart these difficult waters, while only worrying about the general architecture, which could eventually be able to support what Fedimint can already do, while focusing on less mission-critical applications, like:
- CI system coordination,
- review systems,
- etc.
basically - things that could benefit from a BFT Consensus.
Similarly, Fedimint's ambition was always reaching broad end user appeal. This requires a lot of effort: building end user clients including web and mobile apps, cross-platform support, interoperability, API stability, backward compatibility etc.
By ignoring all these ambitions, BFTE can focus first on honing the primary goal: becoming good general purpose modular consensus engine, and be ambitious about other aspects of the design space and implementation.
As of last update the project has most of the core pieces in a working state.
Implemented:
- Simplex BFT consensu algorithm,
- web UI,
- consensus membership changes,
- core consensus and module consensus versioning and upgrades,
- consensus control module,
- metadata module (first simple example module),
BFTE is a standard Rust application. You can clone it and use cargo to build
and run it. Using the provided Nix Flake Dev Shell is recommend.
If you're a Nix user (which you should be), you can easily give it a try:
nix run git+https://radicle.dpc.pw/zii8qFzZhN3vigh8BuxGCuEEp6z4.git -- --help
eg.
> nix run git+https://radicle.dpc.pw/zii8qFzZhN3vigh8BuxGCuEEp6z4.git -- gen-secret > /tmp/secret
PeerId: nk2tb7xtkw5uqyxj65w0fhd3nqdhm7ztbs2uysxrgv3yfc5dbbn1
This mnemonic is irrecoverable if lost. Please make a back up before using it!
> nix run git+https://radicle.dpc.pw/zii8qFzZhN3vigh8BuxGCuEEp6z4.git -- run --secret-path /tmp/secret --data-dir /tmp/
2025-06-13T05:03:19.622758Z INFO bfte::node: Opening redb database… path=/tmp/bfte.redb
2025-06-13T05:03:19.626664Z INFO bfte::node: Iroh endpoint initialized endpoint=a182558e0be2a4c145ad60a5e92fd11356c2d441b43e7925e27b3964ca72ca43 bound_ipv4=0.0.0.0:35687 bound_ipv6=[::]:35688
2025-06-13T05:03:19.626707Z WARN bfte::node: Temporary UI password pass=GYBJQPbFhk
2025-06-13T05:03:19.626858Z INFO bfte::node: Waiting for consensus initialization via web UI
2025-06-13T05:03:19.626905Z INFO bfte::node::ui: Starting web UI server... addr=[::1]:6910
The UI is available on the localhost on port 6910.
BFTE is licensed under MIT.