DecentEdge: A Trusted Edge-Cloud Transaction Processing Protocol for NFT-Based DApps

Abstract

Integrating non-fungible tokens (NFTs) into decentralized user-facing applications like virtual worlds presents significant performance and security challenges. Traditional NFT marketplaces struggle with scalability and security, particularly when off-chain solutions are employed to enhance performance. To tackle these issues, we introduce DecentEdge (Decentralized Edge), a trusted off-chain NFT Marketplace (NFTM) designed to operate closer to the user at the edge. DecentEdge stands out by enabling concurrent, secure processing of multiple transactions on the same NFT off-chain, significantly boosting scalability. This is achieved through two key design ingredients: leveraging Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to secure off-chain operations, and implementing a Multi-Stage NFT transaction processing protocol. This protocol splits NFT transactions into off-chain and on-chain stages, effectively reducing the impact of on-chain latency in typical execution paths. However, this approach introduces potential conflicts between off-chain and on-chain stages, which we address with a carefully designed conflict resolution mechanism to ensure safety and security. Our experiments-conducted on a blockchain network-show that DecentEdge achieves over 300-fold throughput improvement when compared to the state-of-the-art NFTM, OpenSea.