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Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT)

Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) is a distributed system’s ability to maintain specified guarantees despite participants sending conflicting information or behaving maliciously. Thresholds depend on the model. In many BFT protocols, safety requires Byzantine voting power below one third.

Pablo Gómez

Written by Pablo Gómez

Founder & CEO at Metlabs · Reviewed on October 11, 2026

Byzantine failures can produce validly signed but conflicting messages, deliberate omissions or arbitrary behavior. BFT studies whether correct participants can still agree on state and whether the system progresses.

Safety and liveness differ. Thresholds depend on authentication, synchrony and whether influence is measured by nodes or voting power. The below-one-third rule applies to particular models rather than all distributed systems.

PBFT and Tendermint-family protocols are BFT examples. Proof of work addresses a different participation model. Interpreting guarantees requires identifying the protocol and its assumptions.

Sources

  1. Lamport, Shostak and Pease: The Byzantine Generals Problem

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  • BFT

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