Verkle-Accumulator-Based Stateless Transaction Validation (VA-STV) Scheme for the Blockchain-Based IoT Network

Abstract

The blockchain-based Internet of Things (IoT) has served widely across various industries for authentication, cooperation, and data sharing but faced the severe challenge of storage scalability. The storage burden gets worse for IoT devices with limited resources. The state data is essential for efficient transaction issuance and validation. This paper proposes the Verkle accumulator-based stateless transaction validation scheme (VA-STV) for permissionless blockchains to decrease the storage burden of the state data on each node with the acceptable overhead of computation and communication. In the scheme, the current state is summarized as the commitment maintained in the latest block header, and one witness is generated for each token to guarantee its validity. State transitions are realized by updating the commitment and witnesses so that no state is stored on nodes acting as validators and miners. Only the nodes acting as traders should maintain the tokens controlled by themselves and the witnesses locally. The VA-STV is based on the Verkle accumulator (VA), which is a combination of the Verkle tree (VT) and the KZG polynomial commitment scheme. Simulation results show that the VA-STV provides a smaller witness size (0.6× 0.74×) and faster commitment generation (6× 14×) than the existing stateless schemes in the same settings, which indicates the advantages of VA-STV in succinctness and efficiency. Besides, a trade-off between the communication and computation requirements can be achieved by adjusting the branching factor, which improves the adaptability of the proposed scheme for different IoT scenarios.