Related papers: Perils of Parallelism: Transaction Fee Mechanisms …
We use historical data to estimate the potential benefit of speculative techniques for executing Ethereum smart contracts in parallel. We replay transaction traces of sampled blocks from the Ethereum blockchain over time, using a simple…
The development of blockchain technologies has enabled the trustless execution of so-called smart contracts, i.e. programs that regulate the exchange of assets (e.g., cryptocurrency) between users. In a decentralized blockchain, the state…
We describe a plausible probabilistic model for a blockchain queueing environment in which rational, profit-maximising schedulers impose adversarial disciplines on incoming messages containing a payload that encodes a state transition in a…
A transaction fee mechanism (TFM) is an essential component of a blockchain protocol. However, a systematic evaluation of the real-world impact of TFMs is still absent. Using rich data from the Ethereum blockchain, the mempool, and…
Executing smart contracts is a compute and storage-intensive task, which currently dominates modern blockchain's performance. Given that computers are becoming increasingly multicore, concurrency is an attractive approach to improve…
Today's blockchains suffer from low throughput and high latency, which impedes their widespread adoption of more complex applications like smart contracts. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm for smart contract execution. It…
Demand for blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is far larger than supply, necessitating a mechanism that selects a subset of transactions to include "on-chain" from the pool of all pending transactions. This paper investigates the…
The crux of software transactional memory (STM) is to combine an easy-to-use programming interface with an efficient utilization of the concurrent-computing abilities provided by modern machines. But does this combination come with an…
As transaction fees skyrocket today, blockchains become increasingly expensive, hurting their adoption in broader applications. This work tackles the saving of transaction fees for economic blockchain applications. The key insight is that…
Blockchain networks are facing increasingly heterogeneous computational demands, and in response, protocol designers have started building specialized infrastructure to supply that demand. This paper introduces Resonance: a new kind of…
Consider a system in which tasks of different execution times arrive continuously and have to be executed by a set of processors that are prone to crashes and restarts. In this paper we model and study the impact of parallelism and failures…
Smart contracts, the cornerstone of blockchain technology, enable secure, automated distributed execution. Given their role in handling large transaction volumes across clients, miners, and validators, exploring concurrency is critical.…
Users bid in a transaction fee mechanism (TFM) to get their transactions included and confirmed by a blockchain protocol. Roughgarden (EC'21) initiated the formal treatment of TFMs and proposed three requirements: user incentive…
Transactional memory (TM) is a convenient synchronization tool that allows concurrent threads to declare sequences of instructions on shared data as speculative \emph{transactions} with "all-or-nothing" semantics. It is known that dynamic…
Throughput limitations of existing blockchain architectures are well documented and are one of the most significant hurdles for their wide-spread adoption. In our previous proof-of-concept work, we have shown that separating computation…
Blockchain validators can reduce block processing time by exploiting multi-core CPUs, but deterministic execution must preserve a given total order while respecting transaction conflicts and per-block runtime limits. This paper…
The increasing adoption of blockchain technology has led to a growing demand for higher transaction throughput. Traditional blockchain platforms, such as Ethereum, execute transactions sequentially within each block, limiting scalability.…
Consensus protocols are currently the bottlenecks that prevent blockchain systems from scaling. However, we argue that transaction execution is also important to the performance and security of blockchains. In other words, there are ample…
Deterministic execution offers many benefits for debugging, fault tolerance, and security. Running parallel programs deterministically is usually difficult and costly, however - especially if we desire system-enforced determinism, ensuring…
Traditional techniques for synchronization are based on \emph{locking} that provides threads with exclusive access to shared data. \emph{Coarse-grained} locking typically forces threads to access large amounts of data sequentially and,…