Storage Replica: Accelerating the Storage Access of the Ethereum Virtual Machine

Abstract

Ethereum’s smart contracts operate on directly addressable storage that is represented as tries. The performance of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) suffers from slow storage access due to trie encoding, which hampers transaction throughput and scalability. To mitigate the Ethereum storage performance bottleneck, we propose a new storage representation for the EVM that supports asynchronous trie construction. Without changing the Ethereum protocol, we add a flat representation called Storage Replica to improve performance. Storage Replica provides a fast lookup of values in the program’s main thread, while a worker thread prepares the tries for subsequent cryptographic calculations. With a storage overhead of less than 5% (i.e., 10 GB), we achieve up to a 6× speedup in processing smart contracts and a 4× speedup in block commits for the initial 9 M blocks of the Ethereum blockchain.