The core concept of all deterministic databases is simple: if your database is deterministic, multiple geographically-distributed replicas can execute the same transaction log independently, and they will all reach the same state. The problem of implementing a distributed database is reduced to implementing a distributed log.
However, there is one oddity of the Waltz design: the central locking mechanism. Other deterministic databases don't have anything like this, because it's not necessary. You can keep track of locks locally on each replica, and you can rely on every replica to reach the same conclusions about which transactions succeeded and failed, because they are deterministic.
Can anyone clarify why they are managing centralized locks?