No, that was our key insight. Basically, you can think of it as, using something like Paxos requires all replicas to run the same code. So every replica checks for transaction conflicts. However, you actually only need one replica to detect a conflict, so there is no reason for every replica to run the same checks -- this is wasted work. Instead, we just make sure that each conflict is checked by at least one replica.

The other interesting conclusion is that there are other workloads like this. For example, it is possible to build a reliable and better performing lock server in this way as well (and there is an implementation in the github repo). So, you'd get something similar to Chubby, but where the latency to the server is only a single round-trip in the common case.