A Temporal Coordination Layer for Deterministic Leader Consensus Using Exception-Only Voting

Year 2025, Volume: 3 Issue: 2, 62 - 90, 31.12.2025

Omer Abdelmajeed Idris Mohammed , İlhami Muharrem Orak

Abstract

Deterministic leader election mechanisms simplify block validation by allowing participants to locally verify the identity and correctness of the block proposer. However, such protocols introduce a fundamental coordination challenge: participants must agree on when to abandon a non-responsive leader and advance the protocol state. Existing approaches rely on block-centric voting, heavyweight view-change protocols, or tightly coupled pacemaker designs, which incur high communication overhead and persistent state.

This paper introduces a temporal coordination layer that converts consensus voting from block validity to time validity. Instead of voting on blocks, participants vote only on whether a leader’s time window has expired. Upon reaching a threshold, the protocol advances deterministically using exception blocks that require no embedded votes and safely regenerate randomness for subsequent leader election. The design employs exception-only voting, ephemeral vote state, and cascaded escalation to balance responsiveness, scalability, and partition tolerance. We analyze the safety and liveness properties of the approach and discuss its integration with work-based history validation mechanisms to support bootstrapping and long-sleeping nodes.

Keywords

Blockchain , Consensus Protocols , Deterministic Election , Voting , Scalability

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