HotStuff-2 primary sources

Reviewed: 2026-05-14 UTC

Canonical paper / abstract

https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/397
- Best primary source in this pass.
- Used to confirm the core claim that HotStuff-2 simultaneously targets partially synchronous BFT, two-phase commit within a view, optimistic responsiveness, $O (n^{2})$ worst-case communication, and optimistically linear communication.
- Also the cleanest source for the authors’ own framing that HotStuff-2 is a simpler two-phase variant rather than a radically different family.

https://malkhi.com/posts/2023/03/hs2/
- Useful short author-side summary of why the paper matters.
- Used to confirm the intended comparison point against HotStuff and the explicit claim that two phases are enough after all.
- Helpful because it condenses the design goal more directly than the implementation notes do.

https://github.com/NBnet/hotmint/blob/main/docs/protocol.md
- Best concrete mechanism walkthrough available in this pass.
- Used to capture the implementation-facing interpretation of the protocol: QC formation, second-round certification into a double certificate, lock / justify checks, timeout certificates, pacemaker logic, and weighted round-robin leadership.
- Important caveat: this is an implementation-oriented derivative source, not the canonical protocol paper itself, so it is best treated as a practical decomposition aid rather than as the final authority.

HotStuff-2 is best treated as a reusable two-phase responsive BFT baseline, not merely a paper footnote under HotShot/Espresso.
The key reusable split is between the consensus-core commit rule (QC plus second certification), lock/justify safety discipline, and separate pacemaker/view-change machinery.
HotStuff-2 is especially valuable in the corpus because later shared-sequencing systems often inherit leader-based BFT intuition while adding DA and proof-publication layers that should be compared separately rather than flattened together.