ABISchain: Towards a Secure and Scalable Blockchain Using Swarm-based Pruning

Abstract

Due to its features regarding immutability, transparency and traceability, blockchain has emerged as a promising solution in various application domains. However, despite its advantages, blockchain suffers from major drawbacks in terms of scalability and performance. This is due to blockchain’s ever-growing nature. Several research studies focus on optimizing blockchain by adopting new techniques and solutions such as pruning, sharding, SegWit and off chain storage solutions. However, so far, most of the suggested solutions entail massive technical burden, increase complexity and reduce transparency and security. In this work, after conducting a comparison among existing blockchain pruning solutions, we present a new intelligent pruning technique that only prunes spent transactions or previous versions of smart contracts. In the proposed approach, data are pruned according to data usage, allowing each participant to independently provide a data list that should be pruned. Our solution involves an intelligent selection process based on particle swarm optimization that uses node parameters to select the best list from all agents lists, this list will be adopted by all the blockchain network members. The approach is implemented in our ABISchain blockchain. ABIshchain pruning solution will reduce the storage requirements for nodes, increase the overall performance and security level as joining nodes will need only to fetch a pruned blockchain (which is more secure than joining blockchain network with a blockchain snapshots provided by other nodes).