Effective Scaling of Blockchain Beyond Consensus Innovations and Moore's Law

TL;DR

This paper investigates the limitations of current blockchain scaling methods, emphasizing the end of Moore's law, and proposes new strategies through benchmarking and hardware innovations to enhance scalability.

Contribution

It introduces Prism, a benchmarking tool, and provides an in-depth analysis of next-generation scaling strategies beyond consensus innovations.

Findings

Consensus-based scaling is limited without hardware progress.

Hardware and topology innovations can improve blockchain scalability.

Benchmarking reveals key factors affecting resource efficiency.

Abstract

As an emerging technology, blockchain has achieved great success in numerous application scenarios, from intelligent healthcare to smart cities. However, a long-standing bottleneck hindering its further development is the massive resource consumption attributed to the distributed storage and computation methods. This makes blockchain suffer from insufficient performance and poor scalability. Here, we analyze the recent blockchain techniques and demonstrate that the potential of widely-adopted consensus-based scaling is seriously limited, especially in the current era when Moore's law-based hardware scaling is about to end. We achieve this by developing an open-source benchmarking tool, called Prism, for investigating the key factors causing low resource efficiency and then discuss various topology and hardware innovations which could help to scale up blockchain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first in-depth study that explores the next-generation scaling strategies by conducting large-scale and comprehensive benchmarking.