[msackman]

Not quite: Paxos Synod is merely used as the replacement for 2PC as 2PC does not work. So that's just achieving consensus on the txn votes for each node. It's actually vector clocks (and improvements thereof) that manage the dependencies between txns. The novel bits of vector clocks in GoshawkDB is getting them to expand an contract as necessary, rather than just becoming enormous, which happens with some systems.