ClusterPioneer Voting: A Scalable and Energy-Efficient Consensus Mechanism for Permissioned-Blockchain (DeFi) System

In decentralized financial (DeFi) systems operating on permissioned blockchains, achieving scalable, energy-efficient, and secure consensus remains a critical challenge. Traditional consensus mechanisms such as Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), Raft, and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) face significant limitations in scalability, high communication overhead, and restricted fault tolerance, particularly in voting-centric applications. The proposed ClusterPioneer Consensus, a novel cluster-based framework that dynamically distributes computational workloads and aggregates consensus decisions efficiently. Our model presents a dynamic cluster formation that reduces node-to-node message complexity up to 60% compared to PBFT, consensus latency remains between 0.8 to 2.8 seconds (across network sizes ranging from 50 to 1000 nodes), standard deviation less than 5% in workload balancing, and Merkle tamper-proof verification with proof validation times under 150 milliseconds. In the ClusterPioneer security enhances through real-time fault detection and periodic pioneered node rotation, achieves a malicious node detection accuracy 95%. The research study results in the ClusterPioneer model outperforms PBFT, Raft, and DPoS in consensus throughput, achieves 500 transactions per second with minimal energy overhead. In the proposed model we evaluated the models’ scalability, energy efficiency, and fault resilience using simulation and real deployment. This study validates the optimize, rapid, fault-tolerant consensus algorithm for blockchain-based application.