The “free world replication protocol” makes use of client computing resources, wherein the clients are not part of the replicated key-value store, but instead reside in the “free world” outside of the dedicated resources of the nodes of the replicated key-value store. In the free world replication protocol, only a single “write” client is authorized to modify the key-value store at any time but any number of clients may be authorized to read data from the key-value store. The write client sends its transactions to multiple nodes in the replicated key-value store. As a result, the latency between the transaction being sent from the client and the transaction being received by the multiple nodes is reduced by comparison to existing protocols in which each client sends transactions to a single node and that node forwards the transactions. A consensus protocol, driven by a master node, is used to periodically ensure consistency, but the data transactions themselves do not make use of a master node.