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Supermassive Blockchain

Guangda Sun, Jialin Li

Abstract

Storage scalability is paramount in the era of big data blockchain. A storage-scalable blockchain can effectively scale out state storage to an arbitrary number of nodes and reduce the storage pressure on each, similar to distributed databases. Prior research has extensively utilized sharding techniques to attain storage scalability; however, these approaches invariably compromise safety and liveness guarantees. In this work, we propose a novel state-execution decoupled architecture, and Supermassive Blockchain, a novel storage-scalable Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) protocol that can sustain the deterministic security properties of conventional BFT protocols. The state management system employs erasure coding to ensure state availability with scalable storage consumption, while the global consensus and execution layers maintain robust security characteristics. Our evaluation indicates that Supermassive Blockchain achieves better storage scalability compared to prior approaches while incurring low network overhead.

Supermassive Blockchain

Abstract

Storage scalability is paramount in the era of big data blockchain. A storage-scalable blockchain can effectively scale out state storage to an arbitrary number of nodes and reduce the storage pressure on each, similar to distributed databases. Prior research has extensively utilized sharding techniques to attain storage scalability; however, these approaches invariably compromise safety and liveness guarantees. In this work, we propose a novel state-execution decoupled architecture, and Supermassive Blockchain, a novel storage-scalable Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) protocol that can sustain the deterministic security properties of conventional BFT protocols. The state management system employs erasure coding to ensure state availability with scalable storage consumption, while the global consensus and execution layers maintain robust security characteristics. Our evaluation indicates that Supermassive Blockchain achieves better storage scalability compared to prior approaches while incurring low network overhead.
Paper Structure (45 sections, 12 figures, 1 table)

This paper contains 45 sections, 12 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background and Motivation
  3. Blockchain Architecture
  4. Blockchain storage layer
  5. The Need for Storage Scalability
  6. Prior Storage Scaling Solutions
  7. Sharded blockchains.
  8. Stateless blockchains.
  9. Decoupling State from Execution
  10. Storage Scalability and Security Trade-off
  11. The Case for Decoupling State from Execution
  12. A State-Execution Decoupled Architecture
  13. Architecture Overview
  14. State Management Layer
  15. Design Challenges
  16. ...and 30 more sections

Figures (12)

  • Figure 1: Blockchain state size has exhibited rapid growth in recent years. The reductions observed in Ethereum's state size correspond to several client software updates incorporating more efficient storage mechanisms and enhanced pruning strategies.
  • Figure 2: Comparison of blockchain architectures. Each rounded rectangle represents a replicated node. Each sharded area represents a fault-tolerant unit: a consensus committee can tolerate $f$ faulty nodes with $3f+1$ nodes, while a storage shard can tolerate faulty nodes depending on the redundancy configuration. SMS stands for the state management system, the interface of the state management layer.
  • Figure 3: Data flow of fetch and post operations in Supermassive Blockchain.
  • Figure 4: Checkpoint message flow of a shard. Storage node 1 is responsible for the shard. Replica node 4 is failed.
  • Figure 5: Reconfiguration message flow of a shard. Storage node 1 (failed) and 2 are the responsible shards before and after reconfiguration.
  • ...and 7 more figures