StreamChain: Rethinking Blockchain for Datacenters

TL;DR

StreamChain is a novel permissioned blockchain design that processes transactions in a streaming manner, drastically reducing latency while maintaining throughput and security, making it suitable for datacenter environments.

Contribution

It introduces a streaming architecture for permissioned blockchains, eliminating blocks to achieve lower latency without sacrificing throughput or security.

Findings

Latency two orders of magnitude lower than Hyperledger Fabric

Maintains similar throughput to Fabric

Potential to replace traditional databases in datacenters

Abstract

Permissioned blockchains promise secure decentralized data management in business-to-business use-cases. In contrast to Bitcoin and similar public blockchains which rely on Proof-of-Work for consensus and are deployed on thousands of geo-distributed nodes, business-to-business use-cases (such as supply chain management and banking) require significantly fewer nodes, cheaper consensus, and are often deployed in datacenter-like environments with fast networking. However, permissioned blockchains often follow the architectural thinkining behind their WAN-oriented public relatives, which results in end-to-end latencies several orders of magnitude higher than necessary. In this work, we propose StreamChain, a permissioned blockchain design that eliminates blocks in favor of processing transactions in a streaming fashion. This results in a drastically lower latency without reducing throughput or forfeiting reliability and security guarantees. To demonstrate the wide applicability of our design, we prototype StreamChain based on the Hyperledger Fabric, and show that it delivers latency two orders of magnitude lower than Fabric, while sustaining similar throughput. This performance makes StreamChain a potential alternative to traditional databases and, thanks to its streaming paradigm, enables further research around reducing latency through relying on modern hardware in datacenters.