Consensus (Starfish-C)
Monolythium’s consensus is Starfish-C, an uncertified DAG-BFT scheme from the 2025 Starfish paper by Nikita Polyanskii, Sven Muller, and Daniil Vorobyev. The public reference is the paper preprint: Starfish: Scaling Uncertified DAG-Based BFT Consensus.
Why Starfish-C
Section titled “Why Starfish-C”Uncertified DAG-BFT. Starfish-C removes the certified-round dependency that makes many DAG designs heavy under large validator sets.
Linear payload. The design targets O(Mn) payload instead of quadratic broadcast behavior, which is the difference between toy validator sets and hundreds of active operator seats.
Equivocation handling. Contradictory vertices are evidence, not an undefined state. The operator path turns that evidence into slashing and identity consequences.
Operational model
Section titled “Operational model”Three terms matter everywhere else in the docs:
- Vertices — operator-authored DAG entries.
- Waves — round groupings across the operator set.
- Anchors — canonical commit points selected from the DAG.
The user-facing unit is the anchor. Monoscan, SDK helpers, receipts, and operator runbooks should use anchor and round terminology.
Finality
Section titled “Finality”The current public profile uses:
- 4-second rounds.
- ML-DSA-65 round-certificate material. Each operator signs round material independently; the registered profile describes a 7-of-10 bitmap multisig over those independent per-operator signatures. This public page does not specify a leader-selection algorithm or an application acceptance depth.
- SDK proof helpers and raw checkpoint material may exist for an exact artifact or endpoint. Their presence is not a certified trust policy, receipt verifier, checkpoint cadence, or settlement guarantee.
- No end-to-end public contract currently binds raw proof/checkpoint material to independently trusted signer roots and a production acceptance policy.
Consensus certificates use ML-DSA-65 signatures. That bounded statement does not make every application or unreleased design post-quantum. There is no active bridge verifier, proof-market value path, or released SLH-DSA recovery path; see Post-quantum cryptography.