Scaling Blockchains Using Pipelined Execution and Sparse Peers

Abstract

Large cloud providers such as AWS and IBM now provide managed blockchain platforms, showcasing an active interest in blockchains. Unfortunately, blockchains provide poor performance and scalability. This is true even for the Execute-Order-Validate (EOV) style of blockchains which improves over the traditional Order-Execute architecture. We experimentally show that EOV platforms scale poorly using both vertical and horizontal scaling approaches. We find that the throughput is bottlenecked by the Validation and Commit phases, which poorly utilize the resources, limiting performance and scalability.