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EC-Chain: Cost-Effective Storage Solution for Permissionless Blockchains

Minghui Xu, Hechuan Guo, Ye Cheng, Chunchi Liu, Dongxiao Yu, Xiuzhen Cheng

TL;DR

EC-Chain tackles the mounting storage burden in permissionless blockchains by applying $ (k,m)$-$\mathsf{RS}$ erasure coding to both ledger and state data, complemented by a dual-trie state architecture and a dynamic network maintenance protocol. Ledger data leverages batch encoding and height-based encoding, while state data uses a hot/cold dual-trie with expiry/mining/creation to manage data efficiently. A DHT-based data verifiability layer ensures public accessibility and integrity of encoded chunks in open networks. The approach yields storage reductions exceeding $90\%$ relative to native Ethereum, while maintaining transaction latency and throughput comparable to the baseline, indicating practical viability for large-scale permissionless deployments.

Abstract

Permissionless blockchains face considerable challenges due to increasing storage demands, driven by the proliferation of Decentralized Applications (DApps). This paper introduces EC-Chain, a cost-effective storage solution for permissionless blockchains. EC-Chain reduces storage overheads of ledger and state data, which comprise blockchain data. For ledger data, EC-Chain refines existing erasure coding-based storage optimization techniques by incorporating batch encoding and height-based encoding. We also introduce an easy-to-implement dual-trie state management system that enhances state storage and retrieval through state expiry, mining, and creation procedures. To ensure data availability in permissionless environments, EC-Chain introduces a network maintenance scheme tailored for dynamism. Collectively, these contributions allow EC-Chain to provide an effective solution to the storage challenges faced by permissionless blockchains. Our evaluation demonstrates that EC-Chain can achieve a storage reduction of over \(90\%\) compared to native Ethereum Geth.

EC-Chain: Cost-Effective Storage Solution for Permissionless Blockchains

TL;DR

EC-Chain tackles the mounting storage burden in permissionless blockchains by applying - erasure coding to both ledger and state data, complemented by a dual-trie state architecture and a dynamic network maintenance protocol. Ledger data leverages batch encoding and height-based encoding, while state data uses a hot/cold dual-trie with expiry/mining/creation to manage data efficiently. A DHT-based data verifiability layer ensures public accessibility and integrity of encoded chunks in open networks. The approach yields storage reductions exceeding relative to native Ethereum, while maintaining transaction latency and throughput comparable to the baseline, indicating practical viability for large-scale permissionless deployments.

Abstract

Permissionless blockchains face considerable challenges due to increasing storage demands, driven by the proliferation of Decentralized Applications (DApps). This paper introduces EC-Chain, a cost-effective storage solution for permissionless blockchains. EC-Chain reduces storage overheads of ledger and state data, which comprise blockchain data. For ledger data, EC-Chain refines existing erasure coding-based storage optimization techniques by incorporating batch encoding and height-based encoding. We also introduce an easy-to-implement dual-trie state management system that enhances state storage and retrieval through state expiry, mining, and creation procedures. To ensure data availability in permissionless environments, EC-Chain introduces a network maintenance scheme tailored for dynamism. Collectively, these contributions allow EC-Chain to provide an effective solution to the storage challenges faced by permissionless blockchains. Our evaluation demonstrates that EC-Chain can achieve a storage reduction of over compared to native Ethereum Geth.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 29 sections, 2 theorems, 9 figures, 1 table, 2 algorithms.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Pruning and Compression
  4. Stateless Blockchain and Erasure Coding
  5. Limitations of Current Approaches
  6. Preliminary and Network Setting
  7. Preliminary
  8. Blockchain Storage
  9. Erasure Coding (EC)
  10. Distributed Hash Table (DHT)
  11. Network Setting
  12. EC-Chain Design
  13. Distributed Hash Table for Data Verifiability
  14. Ledger Encoding
  15. Batch Encoding
  16. ...and 14 more sections

Key Result

Theorem 1

The redundancy of EC-Chain is upper bounded by $2\lceil \log N \rceil \cdot S$ and lower bounded by $2S$, with an expected value of $\lceil \log N \rceil \cdot S$.

Figures (9)

  • Figure 1: Storage metrics of Ethereum geth node
  • Figure 2: Ledger encoding: an example of applying batch encoding and height-based encoding using $(4,4)$-$\mathsf{RS}$.
  • Figure 3: The dual-trie state management system and cold trie encoding.
  • Figure 4: The sizes of 16 subtries (represented by 16 distinct colors) of the Merkle Patricia Trie (MPT) within the initial one million blocks of Ethereum.
  • Figure 5: The implementation of EC-Chain
  • ...and 4 more figures

Theorems & Definitions (5)

  • Definition 1: Redundancy
  • Theorem 1
  • proof
  • Theorem 2
  • proof