chainBoost: A Secure Performance Booster for Blockchain-based Resource Markets

TL;DR

chainBoost tackles the viability gap in blockchain-based resource markets by introducing a mutually dependent sidechain that offloads heavy service-related workload while logging concise summaries on the mainchain. Its two-block architecture (temporary meta-blocks and permanent summary-blocks), along with a syncing and pruning mechanism, reduces blockchain growth and accelerates service operations. The design includes an autorecovery protocol with backup committees to maintain robustness against interruptions and rollbacks, and it is backed by formal security analysis and a concrete PoC in a Filecoin-like distributed storage market. Experimental results show substantial throughput improvements (up to 11x), large reductions in confirmation time (up to 94%), and significant mainchain storage savings (up to 90%), indicating strong practical potential for scalable, secure decentralized resource markets.

Abstract

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology provide an innovative model for reshaping digital services. Driven by the movement toward Web 3.0, recent systems started to provide distributed services, such as computation outsourcing or file storage, on top of the currency exchange medium. By allowing anyone to join and collect payments for serving others, these systems create decentralized markets for trading digital resources. Yet, there is still a big gap between the promise of these markets and their practical viability. Existing initiatives are still early-stage and have already encountered security and efficiency obstacles. At the same time, existing work around promising ideas, specifically sidechains, fall short in exploiting their full potential in addressing these problems. To bridge this gap, we propose chainBoost, a secure performance booster for decentralized resource markets. It expedites service related operations, reduces the blockchain size, and supports flexible service-payment exchange modalities at low overhead. At its core, chainBoost employs a sidechain, that has a (security and semantic) mutual-dependence with the mainchain, to which the system offloads heavy/frequent operations. To enable it, we develop a novel sidechain architecture composed of temporary and permanent blocks, a block suppression mechanism to prune the sidechain, a syncing protocol to permit arbitrary data exchange between the two chains, and an autorecovery protocol to support robustness and resilience. We analyze the security of chainBoost, and implement a proof-of-concept prototype for a distributed file storage market as a use case. For a market handling around 2000 transactions per round, our experiments show up to 11x improvement in throughput and 94% reduction in confirmation time. They also show that chainBoost can reduce the main blockchain size by around 90%.

Figures (11)

• Figure 1: A generic resource market model.
• Figure 2: $\mathsf{chainBoost}$ diagram.
• Figure 3: Mainchain with and without $\mathsf{chainBoost}$ (service transactions are in red, others are in blue. Summary-blocks and sync-transactions are in yellow).
• Figure 4: System setup.
• Figure 5: Summary rules (assuming one server per a service contract. If it is a set of servers instead, then indexing should indicate the particular server using $\mathsf{tx}\xspace.\mathsf{cid}\xspace.\mathsf{s}$).

Theorems & Definitions (16)

• Theorem 1
• Lemma 1: Preserving safety
• proof
• Lemma 2: Preserving liveness
• proof
• Lemma 3
• Definition 1: Optimal Safety Threshold
• Definition 2: Optimal Liveness Threshold
• Definition 3: Safety Threshold
• Definition 4: Liveness Threshold