Paper 2026/1234

Designing Incentives for Responsive Consensus Protocols

Abstract

Modern consensus protocols often aspire to be responsive---that is, to confirm transactions in time proportional to the actual network delays as opposed to a (typically much larger) worst-case bound on network delays. Responsiveness can yield substantial practical improvements in both protocol latency and throughput. In blockchain settings, however, block proposers commonly have economic incentives (most notably MEV) to delay their blocks, a phenomenon repeatedly observed in practice, e.g., in the block production supply chains for Ethereum and Solana. Such incentives clash with responsiveness in existing protocol designs. This paper develops a rigorous framework for designing incentive-compatible responsive consensus protocols. We first consider the canonical case of single-leader protocols and establish feasibility results characterizing the conditions on the distribution of network latency under which responsiveness can be incentivized through a suitable reward function. We further quantify the amount of stake required from the leader to deter dishonest delays. We then show strong positive results for protocols with multiple leaders, demonstrating that the multi-leader approach is fundamentally superior to single-leader designs for resolving the tension between responsiveness and incentive-compatibility: by forcing leaders to compete for rewards, much of the burden otherwise placed on the incentive mechanism is alleviated. Notably, this results in simpler reward mechanisms with no stake requirements that also remain feasible in parameter regimes which are provably impossible under a single leader.