A Scalable Double-Chain Storage Module for Blockchain

Abstract

With the growing maturity of blockchain technology, its peer-to-peer model and fully duplicated data storage pattern enable blockchain to act as a distributed ledger in untrustworthy environments. Blockchain storage has also become a research hotspot in industry, finance, and academia due to its security, and its unique data storage management model is gradually becoming a key technology to play its value in various fields’ applications. However, with the increasing amount of data written into the blockchain, the blockchain system faces many problems in its actual implementation of the application, such as high storage space occupation, low data flexibility and availability, low retrieval efficiency, poor scalability, etc. To improve the above problems, this paper combines off-chain storage technology and de-duplication technology to optimize the blockchain storage model. Firstly, this paper adopts the double-chain model to reduce the data storage of the major chain system, which stores a small amount of primary data and supervises the vice chain through an Application Programming Interface (API). The vice chain stores a large number of copies of data as well as non-transactional data. Our model divides the vice chain storage system into two layers, including a storage layer and a processing layer. In the processing layer, deduplication technology is applied to reduce the redundancy of vice chain data. Our double-chain storage model with high scalability enhances data flexibility, is more suitable as a distributed storage system, and performs well in data retrieval.