Blockchain-native mechanism supporting the circulation of complex physical assets

Abstract

An increasing number of physical assets, such as academic certificates and credentials, are being represented in the form of digital assets. These assets always involve multiple statuses, rules, and complex associations. It is challenging to determine the transaction execution order using the existing blockchains because they lack the ability to record and execute associations between assets, which results in problems of inconsistency of assets, such as the loss of asset status changes and status conflict between transactions. This study proposes a blockchain-native mechanism supporting complex physical assets, including a novel digital asset model and transaction validity guarantee protocol. Under the premise of ensuring safety and performance, the proposed mechanism can fully describe different associations and their influence on the transaction execution order. This study builds a global deterministic transaction execution sequence that can be executed in parallel to guarantee the consistency of complex digital assets based on partial orders. Theoretical analysis of the proposed mechanism demonstrates that it can guarantee digital asset consistency and can protect against attacks such as reentrant and transaction sequence attacks. Furthermore, experiments show that the proposed mechanism can achieve a transaction execution speed of up to 10,000 transactions per second, and this speed can be further increased by increasing the number of CPU cores.