Optimizing Blockchain Network Performance Using Blake3 Hash Function in POS Consensus Algorithm

Abstract

Recent years have seen extensive adoption of blockchain technology across a variety of application domains, all with the goal of enhancing data privacy, system trustworthiness, and security. One of the biggest problems with blockchain is its inability to scale; other problems include energy consumption, latency, throughput, and the ever-increasing volume of daily transactions. The consensus technique relies on hash functions, which are important to highlight. Thus, such development is fundamental to blockchain advances in terms of structure. This study introduces a revolutionary change to the Proof-of-Stake (POS) consensus methods by suggesting the replacement of the commonly used SHA256 hash function with the extremely efficient Blake3. Many blockchain-based systems, including POS algorithms, still employ the widely used SHA256 algorithm for cryptographic hashing. Nevertheless, fresh research has shown that SHA256 has performance and security flaws. We show that the Blake3 hash function, is better than the SHA256 hash in many respects, including latency, throughput, and energy, via rigorous testing and functional analysis. Diverse parameters were utilized, including the quantity of blocks and validators. Seen cases are taken into account for performance evaluation. In the initial scenario, utilizing 500 blocks and 4 validators, our proposed methodology has surpassed the benchmark by achieving a 66% reduction in latency, over 50% in throughput, and a 55% decrease in energy consumption. The rate of enhancement is nearly uniform across all other instances, indicating that the implementation of Blake3 within the conventional POS consensus mechanism has demonstrated its advantages.