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BlockGraph: a scalable secure distributed ledger that exploits locality

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Abstract

Distributed public ledgers, the key to modern cryptocurrencies and the heart of many novel applications, have scalability problems. Ledgers such as the blockchain underlying Bitcoin can process fewer than 10 transactions per second (TPS). The cost of transactions is high, and the time to confirm a transaction is in the minutes. We present the BlockGraph, a scalable distributed public ledger inspired by principles of computer architecture. The BlockGraph exploits the natural locality of transactions to allow publishing independent transactions in parallel. It extends the blockchain with three new transactions to create a unified consistent ledger out of essentially independent blockchains. The most important change is the introduction of the blockstamp transaction, which essentially checkpoints a local blockchain and secures it against attack. The result is a locality-based, simple, secure, sharding protocol which keeps all transactions readable. This paper introduces the BlockGraph protocol, proves that it is consistent and can achieve many thousands of TPS. Using our implementation (a small extension to Bitcoin core) we demonstrate that it, in practice, can significantly improve throughput.

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Notes

  1. Likewise, global miners will also have less work, since they only need to verify the global chain and the local chains for which they are generating BSPs

  2. An ancestor-or-self block is the block or any of the block’s ancestors. Likewise, a descendant-or-self block is the block or any of its descendants.

  3. We use P2PKH as a canonical stand-in for all Bitcoin transactions, e.g., P2SH, Multisig, etc. since their semantics do not change on the BlockGraph as their inputs and outputs are all intra-chain.

  4. Recall that XDP on local chains do not have special requirements on its ITT inputs on the global chain.

  5. We do not count the small portion of BSPs on the global chain. And, this analysis is worse case in that we do not account for the advantage of using XATs .

  6. These numbers include the space that BSPs take up on the global chain, unlike the theorem.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Seth Copen Goldstein & Sixiang Gao

  2. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Zhenbo Sun

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  1. Seth Copen Goldstein
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Correspondence to Seth Copen Goldstein.

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Goldstein, S.C., Gao, S. & Sun, Z. BlockGraph: a scalable secure distributed ledger that exploits locality. Distrib Parallel Databases 42, 217–244 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10619-022-07411-z

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