TINC: Trusted Intelligent NetChain
Qi Xia, Hu Xia, Isaac Amankona Obiri, Adjei-Arthur Bonsu, Grace Mupoyi Ntuala, Ansu Badjie, Tienin Bole Wilfried, Jiaqin Liu, Lan Ma, Jianbin Gao, Feng Yao
TL;DR
TINC tackles scalability and trust in consortium blockchains by introducing a three-plane architecture (Root, Control, Data) and Dynamic Decentralized Identifiers (DDIDs) to enable adaptive node and workload distribution. The scheme integrates a PBFT-based intra-shard protocol with a Byzantine fault-tolerant cross-shard atomic commit (PBFT-AC) and an optimistic Fast Path to reduce latency, while decoupling control and data operations for efficiency. DDIDs provide mutable, auditable identity management that evolves with consortium membership and roles, with a threshold-signature mechanism ensuring secure authorization. Experimental results against a strong baseline show higher throughput, lower latency, improved resource utilization, and robust security guarantees, illustrating TINC’s practical impact for scalable, trusted enterprise blockchain deployments.
Abstract
Blockchain technology facilitates the development of decentralized systems that ensure trust and transparency without the need for expensive centralized intermediaries. However, existing blockchain architectures particularly consortium blockchains face critical challenges related to scalability and efficiency. State sharding has emerged as a promising approach to enhance blockchain scalability and performance. However, current shard-based solutions often struggle to guarantee fair participation and a balanced workload distribution among consortium members. To address these limitations, we propose Trusted Intelligent NetChain (TINC), a multi-plane sharding architecture specifically designed for consortium blockchains. TINC incorporates intelligent mechanisms for adaptive node assignment and dynamic workload balancing, enabling the system to respond effectively to changing network conditions while maintaining equitable shard utilization. By decoupling the control and data planes, TINC allows control nodes to focus on consensus operations, while data nodes handle large-scale storage, thus improving overall resource efficiency. Extensive experimental evaluation and formal analysis demonstrate that TINC significantly outperforms existing shard-based blockchain frameworks. It achieves higher throughput, lower latency, balanced node and transaction distributions, and reduced transaction failure rates. Furthermore, TINC maintains essential blockchain security guarantees, exhibiting resilience against Byzantine faults and dynamic network environments. The integration of Dynamic Decentralized Identifiers (DDIDs) further strengthens trust and security management within the consortium network.