Comment by _benedict

Not even a coincidence really, it's a very different kind of system. It's an implementation of Hermes with network layer integration. Hermes is designed with very different goals in mind, specifically within-DC consensus with minimal failures (with the caveat I am not intimately familiar):

- Every replica must acknowledge a write, which is undesirable in a WAN setting, due to having to wait for replies from the furthest region

- At most one concurrent "read-modify-write" operation may succeed, so peak throughput is limited by request latency

- Failure of any replica requires reconfiguration for any request to succeed (equivalent to leader election), so the leaderless property here does not improve tail latencies, indeed it is likely harmed by exposing your workload to more required reconfigurations

Cassandra is designed for multiple (usually quite far apart) DC deployments that want to maximise availability and minimise latency, and where failure is expected. Here a quorum system is typically preferable for request latency.