This is our most recent work, started and led by Aleksey Charapko . (This is a joint post with him.) You can get the paper at arxiv.org . The paper is currently under submission to a journal.The story One day I challenged Aleksey to give me a ballpark number on how much he thinks we can scale Paxos. While sharding --as in CockroachDB and Spanner-- helps for scaling Paxos deployments horizontally, vertical scaling is about how many nodes you can cram in a single Paxos cluster, with a single conflict domain.Aleksey, who is not known for being an optimist, said that we can scale Paxos to several hundreds of nodes! He said this may be possible by employing intermediate proxy nodes to relay the communication between the leader and followers, as this would relieve the communication bottleneck at the leader.I thought "yeah, it is a neat trick, but maybe not that impressive, because it is very simple". Surely others must have tried this, and there must be a catch/drawbac…