FASTBLOCK: Accelerating Blockchains via Hardware Transactional Memory

Abstract

The efficiency of block lifecycle determines the performance of blockchain, which is critically affected by the execution, mining and validation steps in blockchain lifecycle. To accelerate blockchains, many works focus on optimizing the mining step while ignoring other steps. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain framework-FastBlock to speed up the execution and validation steps by introducing efficient concurrency. To efficiently prevent the potential concurrency violations, FastBlock utilizes symbolic execution to identify minimal atomic sections in each transaction and guarantees the atomicity of these sections in execution step via an efficient concurrency control mechanism-hardware transactional memory (HTM). To enable a deterministic validation step, FastBlock concurrently re-executes transactions based on a happen-before graph without increasing block size. Finally, we implement FastBlock and evaluate it in terms of conflicting transactions rate, number of transactions per block, and varying thread number. Our results indicate that FastBlock is efficient: the execution step and validation step speed up to 3.0x and 2.3x on average over the original serial model respectively with eight concurrent threads.