FastFabric: Scaling Hyperledger Fabric to 20,000 Transactions per Second

TL;DR

This paper presents FastFabric, an optimized version of Hyperledger Fabric that significantly increases transaction throughput from 3,000 to 20,000 TPS by addressing performance bottlenecks without altering the core interface.

Contribution

The paper introduces architectural modifications to Hyperledger Fabric that enhance throughput while maintaining compatibility, focusing on reducing computation and I/O overhead.

Findings

Achieved 20,000 TPS throughput in Hyperledger Fabric

Optimizations are plug-and-play and interface-compatible

Significant performance improvements over baseline

Abstract

Blockchain technologies are expected to make a significant impact on a variety of industries. However, one issue holding them back is their limited transaction throughput, especially compared to established solutions such as distributed database systems. In this paper, we re-architect a modern permissioned blockchain system, Hyperledger Fabric, to increase transaction throughput from 3,000 to 20,000 transactions per second. We focus on performance bottlenecks beyond the consensus mechanism, and we propose architectural changes that reduce computation and I/O overhead during transaction ordering and validation to greatly improve throughput. Notably, our optimizations are fully plug-and-play and do not require any interface changes to Hyperledger Fabric.