LiftChain: A Scalable Multi-Stage NFT Transaction Protocol

Abstract

The Non-fungible token (NFT) market has been booming with some reports estimating the surge in the market value to over 80 Billion USD in 2025. With this surge, comes the challenge of scaling NFT transactions and providing low latency responses to end-users. Exclusive layer-1 blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum which focus more on security and traceability are not suitable for high throughput NFT transactions of low value due to high gas fees. Layer-2 solutions can scale but have a trade-off of losing some strong decentralization and security guarantees offered by the Mainnet. In this paper, we propose LiftChain, a multi-stage NFT transaction protocol that can scale for high volume NFT transactions and at the same time inherit the security guarantees from Mainnet. LiftChain differs from existing NFT transaction protocols in that it allows multiple NFT transactions in the off-chain before becoming consistent with the on-chain. LiftChain also uses batching for gas fee savings and better bandwidth utilization. Our evaluations show that LiftChain provides comparable performance to baseline off-chain and with batching we see more than a 5-fold improvement in gas fee savings.