CHIRON: Accelerating Node Synchronization without Security Trade-offs in Distributed Ledgers
Ray Neiheiser, Arman Babaei, Giannis Alexopoulos, Marios Kogias, Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias
TL;DR
This work tackles blockchain throughput by addressing the execution-layer bottlenecks that arise when decoupling consensus from execution. It introduces Chiron, a guided parallel execution framework that extracts dependency hints from normal execution, propagates them to stragglers and full nodes, and schedules transactions to maximize parallelism without relaxing safety. Empirically, Chiron achieves up to a $30\%$ speedup on realistic workloads derived from Ethereum and Solana, with larger gains under higher contention and when signature verification runs on idle cores. The paper also contributes realistic workload benchmarks and discusses how to extend hint-based catch-up to other execution engines, offering practical pathways to improve performance without compromising security.
Abstract
Blockchain performance has historically faced challenges posed by the throughput limitations of consensus algorithms. Recent breakthroughs in research have successfully alleviated these constraints by introducing a modular architecture that decouples consensus from execution. The move toward independent optimization of the consensus layer has shifted attention to the execution layer. While concurrent transaction execution is a promising solution for increasing throughput, practical challenges persist. Its effectiveness varies based on the workloads, and the associated increased hardware requirements raise concerns about undesirable centralization. This increased requirement results in full nodes and stragglers synchronizing from signed checkpoints, decreasing the trustless nature of blockchain systems. In response to these challenges, this paper introduces Chiron, a system designed to extract execution hints for the acceleration of straggling and full nodes. Notably, Chiron achieves this without compromising the security of the system or introducing overhead on the critical path of consensus. Evaluation results demonstrate a notable speedup of up to 30%, effectively addressing the gap between theoretical research and practical deployment. The quantification of this speedup is achieved through realistic blockchain benchmarks derived from a comprehensive analysis of Ethereum and Solana workloads, constituting an independent contribution.