Abstract
Blockchain technology provides a “tamper-proof distributed ledger” for its users. Typically, to ensure the integrity and immutability of the transaction data, each node in a blockchain network retains a full copy of the ledger; however, this characteristic imposes an increasing storage burden upon each node with the accumulation of data. In this paper, an off-chain solution is introduced to relieve the storage burden of blockchain nodes while ensuring the integrity of the off-chain data. In our solution, an off-chain remote DB server stores the fully replicated data while the nodes only store the commitments of the data to verify whether the off-chain data are tampered with. To minimize the influence on performance, the nodes will store data locally at first and transfer it to the remote DB server when otherwise idle. Our solution also supports accessing all historical data for newly joined nodes through a snapshot mechanism. The solution is implemented based on the Hyperledger Fabric (HLF). Experiments show that our solution reduces the block data for blockchain nodes by 93.3% compared to the original HLF and that our advanced solution enhances the TPS by 9.6% compared to our primary solution.
Highlights
Ravasan, Taha Mansouri, MichalBlockchain systems are categorized into permissionless blockchains (a.k.a. a public blockchain) and permissioned blockchains (a.k.a. a consortium/private blockchain)
We are focusing on enterprise-level applications while Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a popular permissioned blockchain solution for information-sharing among companies due to its high performance and rich privacy preserving mechanisms [4,21]; The nodes in a HLF network are already divided into “organizations”, which is suitable for building a CU since the peers in an organization are managed by the same administrator, and they are identified by each other through digital signatures; The snapshot mechanism introduced in HLF V2.3.2 provides a perfect timing to perform the “data-reduction” operation of our solution
Our solution relieves the storage burden of blockchain nodes by adding an off-chain remote DB server for each CU in blockchain network to store the blocks while ensuring data integrity
Summary
Blockchain systems are categorized into permissionless blockchains (a.k.a. a public blockchain) and permissioned blockchains (a.k.a. a consortium/private blockchain). Since the size of the chain of blocks increases continually, the blockchain systems are facing a storage scalability issue. Off-chain solutions provide off-chain storage devices to store data, but most of them focus on reducing the data size before the data are uploaded to blockchains [14,15,16,17]. An off-chain solution to solve the data scalability issue of blockchain systems while ensuring the integrity of the data stored off-chain is proposed, the target of this solution is to reduce the size of the data that has been uploaded to the blockchain and stored in the blockchain nodes.
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