BlockReduce: Scaling Blockchain to Human Commerce

TL;DR

BlockReduce introduces a novel blockchain architecture that scales transaction throughput to tens of thousands per second by segmenting only consistency, reducing resource demands and maintaining decentralization and fault tolerance.

Contribution

It proposes a new blockchain structure that scales efficiently by segmenting only consistency, simplifying implementation compared to existing multi-function segmentation approaches.

Findings

Achieves tens of thousands of transactions per second.

Reduces node bandwidth and network latency.

Maintains fault tolerance and decentralization.

Abstract

Blockchains have shown great promise as peer-to-peer digital currency systems over the past 10 years. However, with increased popularity, the demand for processing transactions has also grown leading to increased costs, confirmation times, and limited blockchain utility. There have been a number of proposals on how to scale blockchains, such as Plasma, Polkadot, Elastico, RapidChain, Bitcoin-NG, and OmniLedger. These solutions all propose the segmentation of every function of a blockchain, namely consensus, permanent data storage, transaction processing, and consistency, which significantly increases the complexity and difficulty of implementation. BlockReduce is a new blockchain structure which only segments consistency, allowing it to scale to handle tens of thousands of transactions per second without impacting fault tolerance or decentralization. Moreover, BlockReduce will significantly decrease node bandwidth requirements and network latency through incentives while simultaneously minimizing other resource demands in order to prevent centralization of nodes.