Formally Documenting Tenderbake

Abstract

International audienceIn this paper, we propose a formal documentation of Tenderbake, the new Tezos consensus algorithm, slated to replace the current Emmy family algorithms. The algorithm is broken down to its essentials and represented as an automaton. The automaton models the various aspects of the algorithm: (i) the individual participant, referred to as a baker, (ii) how bakers communicate over the network (the mempool) and (iii) the overall network the bakers operate in. We also present a TLA+ implementation, which has proven to be useful for reasoning about this automaton and refining our documentation. The main goal of this work is to serve as a formal foundation for extracting intricate test scenarios and verifying invariants that Tenderbake's implementation should satisfy