  Arma is a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus system designed to achieve
horizontal scalability across all hardware resources: network bandwidth, CPU,
and disk I/O. As opposed to preceding BFT protocols, Arma separates the
dissemination and validation of client transactions from the consensus process,
restricting the latter to totally ordering only metadata of batches of
transactions. This separation enables each party to distribute compute and
storage resources for transaction validation, dissemination and disk I/O among
multiple machines, resulting in horizontal scalability. Additionally, Arma
ensures censorship resistance by imposing a maximum time limit on the inclusion
of client transactions. We built and evaluated two Arma prototypes. The first
is an independent system handling over 200,000 transactions per second, the
second integrated into Hyperledger Fabric, speeding its consensus by an order
of magnitude.
