MANTA: Unlocking DAG Flexibility in Asynchronous BFT

arXiv:2610.34419v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: DAG-based BFT protocols marked a shift in consensus design by replacing single-leader proposal paths with concurrent block proposals linked through a shared graph, where references encode consensus evidence. However, under heterogeneous wide-area networks (WANs), existing designs suffer from prolonged rounds and degraded performance due to straggler effects. The root cause is rigid round advancement: replicas move in synchronized rounds, waiting for enough references from the previous round before advancing. We propose a flexible DAG growth framework for asynchronous BFT consensus. Our key observation is that while reference quorums are necessary for safety and liveness, they need not block every round advancement. Instead, the connectivity r