research-article

SlimChain: scaling blockchain transactions through off-chain storage and parallel processing

Authors:

Jian PeiAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Volume 14, Issue 11

Pages 2314 - 2326

https://doi.org/10.14778/3476249.3476283

Published: 01 July 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Blockchain technology has emerged as the cornerstone of many decentralized applications operating among otherwise untrusted peers. However, it is well known that existing blockchain systems do not scale well. Transactions are often executed and committed sequentially in order to maintain the same view of the total order. Furthermore, it is necessary to duplicate both transaction data and their executions in every node in the blockchain network for integrity assurance. Such storage and computation requirements put significant burdens on the blockchain system, not only limiting system scalability but also undermining system security and robustness by making the network more centralized. To tackle these problems, in this paper, we propose SlimChain, a novel blockchain system that scales transactions through off-chain storage and parallel processing. Advocating a stateless design, SlimChain maintains only the short commitments of ledger states on-chain while dedicating transaction executions and data storage to off-chain nodes. To realize SlimChain, we propose new schemes for off-chain smart contract execution, on-chain transaction validation, and state commitment. We also propose optimizations to reduce network transmissions and a new sharding technique to improve system scalability further. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the performance of the proposed SlimChain system. Compared with the existing systems, SlimChain reduces the on-chain storage requirements by 97% ~ 99%, while also improving the peak throughput by 1.4× ~ 15.6×.

References

[1]

T.T. A. Dinh, J. Wang, G. Chen, R. Liu, B. C. Ooi, and K.-L. Tan. 2017. Blockbench: A framework for analyzing private blockchains. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 1085--1100.

Digital Library

[2]

C. Xu, C. Zhang, and J. Xu. 2019. vChain: Enabling verifiable boolean range queries over blockchain databases. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management, 141--158.

Digital Library

[3]

C. Zhang, C. Xu, H. Wang, J. Xu, and B. Choi. 2021. Authenticated keyword search in scalable hybrid-storage blockchains. In Proceedings of the 37th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, 996--1007.

[4]

S. Nakamoto. 2008. Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.

[5]

A. Azaria, A. Ekblaw, T. Vieira, and A. Lippman. 2016. Medrec: Using blockchain for medical data access and permission management. In 2nd International Conference on Open and Big Data, 25--30.

[6]

S. A. Abeyratne and R. P. Monfared. 2016. Blockchain ready manufacturing supply chain using distributed ledger. International Journal of Research in Engineering and Technology, 5, 9, 1--10.

[7]

G. Wood. 2014. Ethereum: A secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger. https://ethereum.github.io/yellowpaper/paper.pdf.

[8]

M. Zamani, M. Movahedi, and M. Raykova. 2018. Rapidchain: Scaling block-chain via full sharding. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 931--948.

Digital Library

[9]

M. El-Hindi, C. Binnig, A. Arasu, D. Kossmann, and R. Ramamurthy. 2019. BlockchainDB: A shared database on blockchains. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 12, 11, 1597--1609.

Digital Library

[10]

A. Chepurnoy, C. Papamanthou, and Y. Zhang. 2018. EDRAX: A cryptocurrency with stateless transaction validation. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2018/968. (2018).

[11]

D. Boneh, B. Bünz, and B. Fisch. 2019. Batching techniques for accumulators with applications to iops and stateless blockchains. In Annual International Cryptology Conference, 561--586.

[12]

A. Tomescu, I. Abraham, V. Buterin, J. Drake, D. Feist, and D. Khovratovich. 2020. Aggregatable subvector commitments for stateless cryptocurrencies. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2020/527. (2020).

[13]

E. Androulaki et al. 2018. Hyperledger Fabric: A distributed operating system for permissioned blockchains. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth EuroSys Conference.

Digital Library

[14]

C. Fan, S. Ghaemi, H. Khazaei, and P. Musilek. 2020. Performance evaluation of blockchain systems: a systematic survey. IEEE Access, 8, 126927--126950.

[15]

R. C. Merkle. 1989. A certified digital signature. In Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology, 218--238.

Digital Library

[16]

B. Parno, J. Howell, C. Gentry, and M. Raykova. 2013. Pinocchio: Nearly practical verifiable computation. In 2013 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 238--252.

Digital Library

[17]

E. Ben-Sasson, A. Chiesa, E. Tromer, and M. Virza. 2014. Succinct non-interactive zero knowledge for a von Neumann architecture. In 23rd USENIX Security Symposium, 781--796.

Digital Library

[18]

C. Costello, C. Fournet, J. Howell, M. Kohlweiss, B. Kreuter, M. Naehrig, B. Parno, and S. Zahur. 2015. Geppetto: Versatile verifiable computation. In 2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 253--270.

Digital Library

[19]

J.-E. Ekberg, K. Kostiainen, and N. Asokan. 2013. Trusted execution environments on mobile devices. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 1497--1498.

Digital Library

[20]

V. Costan and S. Devadas. 2016. IntelSGX explained. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2016/086. (2016).

[21]

O. P. Project. 2020. The oasis blockchain platform. https://oasisprotocol.org/papers.

[22]

J. Teutsch and C. Reitwießner. 2019. A scalable verification solution for block-chains. arXiv.

[23]

F. Saleh. 2020. Blockchain without waste: Proof-of-stake. The Review of Financial Studies, 34, 3, 1156--1190.

[24]

M. Castro and B. Liskov. 2002. Practical byzantine fault tolerance and proactive recovery. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 20, 4, 398--461.

Digital Library

[25]

R. G. Brown, J. Carlyle, I. Grigg, and M. Hearn. 2016. Corda: An introduction. https://docs.corda.net/en/pdf/corda-introductory-whitepaper.pdf.

[26]

J. P. M. Chase. [n. d.] Quorum: A permissioned implementation of ethereum. https://github.com/jpmorganchase/quorum.

[27]

A. Sharma, F. M. Schuhknecht, D. Agrawal, and J. Dittrich. 2019. Blurring the lines between blockchains and database systems: the case of hyperledger fabric. In Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Management of Data, 105--122.

Digital Library

[28]

H. Dang, T. T. A. Dinh, D. Loghin, E.-C. Chang, Q. Lin, and B. C. Ooi. 2019. Towards scaling blockchain systems via sharding. In Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Management of Data, 123--140.

Digital Library

[29]

S. Nathan, C. Govindarajan, A. Saraf, M. Sethi, and P. Jayachandran. 2019. Blockchain meets database: Design and implementation of a blockchain relational database. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 12, 11, 1539--1552.

Digital Library

[30]

P. Ruan, D. Loghin, Q.-T. Ta, M. Zhang, G. Chen, and B. C. Ooi. 2020. A transactional perspective on execute-order-validate blockchains. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 543--557.

Digital Library

[31]

C. Gorenflo, S. Lee, L. Golab, and S. Keshav. 2019. FastFabric: Scaling hyper-ledger fabric to 20,000 transactions per second. In 2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, 455--463.

[32]

C. Gorenflo, L. Golab, and S. Keshav. 2020. XOX Fabric: A hybrid approach to blockchain transaction execution. In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, 1--9.

[33]

M. Al-Bassam, A. Sonnino, S. Bano, D. Hrycyszyn, and G. Danezis. 2017. Chainspace: A sharded smart contracts platform. arXiv.

[34]

S. Gupta, S. Rahnama, J. Hellings, and M. Sadoghi. 2020. ResilientDB: Global scale resilient blockchain fabric. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 13, 6, 868--883.

Digital Library

[35]

S. Gorbunov, L. Reyzin, H. Wee, and Z. Zhang. 2020. Pointproofs: Aggregating proofs for multiple vector commitments. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2020/419. (2020).

Digital Library

[36]

H. Berenson, P. Bernstein, J. Gray, J. Melton, E. O'Neil, and P. O'Neil. 1995. A critique of ANSI SQL isolation levels. In Proceedings of the 1995 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 1--10.

Digital Library

[37]

A. Adya, B. Liskov, and P. O'Neil. 2000. Generalized isolation level definitions. In Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Data Engineering, 67--78.

Digital Library

[38]

M. J. Cahill, U. Röhm, and A. D. Fekete. 2009. Serializable isolation for snapshot databases. ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 20--42.

Digital Library

[39]

C. Xu, C. Zhang, J. Xu, and J. Pei. 2021. SlimChain: Scaling blockchain transactions through off-chain storage and parallel processing (technical report). https://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/~db/slimchain.pdf.

Digital Library

Cited By

Wu HZhu XHu W(2024)A Blockchain System for Clustered Federated Learning with Peer-to-Peer Knowledge TransferProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3641204.364120817:5(966-979)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/3641204.3641208
Song MSong HBen Amar NSeo YSon YEom H(2024)Microcosm: A Scalable Transaction Processing Scheme for Modular Blockchain (Industry Track)Proceedings of the 25th International Middleware Conference Industrial Track10.1145/3700824.3701096(22-28)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3700824.3701096
Liang WLiu YYang CXie SLi KSusilo W(2024)On Identity, Transaction, and Smart Contract Privacy on Permissioned and Permissionless Blockchain: A Comprehensive SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/367616456:12(1-35)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3676164
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

SlimChain: scaling blockchain transactions through off-chain storage and parallel processing
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

Recommendations

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment

Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment Volume 14, Issue 11

July 2021

732 pages

ISSN:2150-8097

Editors:
Xin Luna Dong
Amazon
,
Felix Naumann
HPI, University of Potsdam

Issue’s Table of Contents

Publisher

VLDB Endowment

Publication History

Published: 01 July 2021

Published in PVLDB Volume 14, Issue 11

Qualifiers

Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

18
Total Citations
View Citations
937
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)235
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)26

Reflects downloads up to 16 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Wu HZhu XHu W(2024)A Blockchain System for Clustered Federated Learning with Peer-to-Peer Knowledge TransferProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3641204.364120817:5(966-979)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/3641204.3641208
Song MSong HBen Amar NSeo YSon YEom H(2024)Microcosm: A Scalable Transaction Processing Scheme for Modular Blockchain (Industry Track)Proceedings of the 25th International Middleware Conference Industrial Track10.1145/3700824.3701096(22-28)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3700824.3701096
Liang WLiu YYang CXie SLi KSusilo W(2024)On Identity, Transaction, and Smart Contract Privacy on Permissioned and Permissionless Blockchain: A Comprehensive SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/367616456:12(1-35)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3676164
Song JJeong JLee JNa IKim MSerra ESpezzano F(2024)HTFabric: A Fast Re-ordering and Parallel Re-execution Method for a High-Throughput BlockchainProceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3627673.3679606(2118-2127)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627673.3679606
Capretto MCeresa MFndez Anta ARusso ASánchez C(2024)Improving Blockchain Scalability with the Setchain Data-TypeDistributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice10.1145/36269633:2(1-27)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626963
Liu DHuang CXue LZhuang WShen XYing B(2024)Collaborative and Verifiable VNF Management for Metaverse With Efficient Modular DesignsIEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications10.1109/JSAC.2023.334542242:3(616-628)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/JSAC.2023.3345422
Tortola DLisi AMori PRicci L(2024)Tethering Layer 2 solutions to the blockchainComputer Communications10.1016/j.comcom.2024.07.017225:C(289-310)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.comcom.2024.07.017
Gu BNawab F(2024)zk-Oracle: trusted off-chain compute and storage for decentralized applicationsDistributed and Parallel Databases10.1007/s10619-024-07444-642:4(525-548)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10619-024-07444-6
Xu LChoi BPeng YXu JS Bhowmick S(2023)A Framework for Privacy Preserving Localized Graph Pattern Query ProcessingProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/35892741:2(1-27)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589274
Li HChen YShi XBai XMo NLi WGuo RWang ZSun YMohror KArnold DBadia R(2023)FISCO-BCOS: An Enterprise-grade Permissioned Blockchain System with High-performanceProceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis10.1145/3581784.3607053(1-17)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3581784.3607053
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents