ACeD: Scalable Data Availability Oracle

TL;DR

ACeD introduces a scalable, efficient data availability protocol for blockchains that guarantees data accessibility with minimal communication overhead using innovative coding and Merkle tree techniques.

Contribution

It presents the first scalable data availability solution with O(1) communication efficiency, integrating coding theory with Merkle trees for worst-case corruption guarantees.

Findings

Achieves up to 10,000 transactions per second in Ethereum testnet

Reduces gas costs by 6000x on Kovan testnet

Provides worst-case corruption guarantees for data availability

Abstract

A popular method in practice offloads computation and storage in blockchains by relying on committing only hashes of off-chain data into the blockchain. This mechanism is acknowledged to be vulnerable to a stalling attack: the blocks corresponding to the committed hashes may be unavailable at any honest node. The straightforward solution of broadcasting all blocks to the entire network sidesteps this data availability attack, but it is not scalable. In this paper, we propose ACeD, a scalable solution to this data availability problem with $O(1)$ communication efficiency, the first to the best of our knowledge. The key innovation is a new protocol that requires each of the $N$ nodes to receive only $O(1/N)$ of the block, such that the data is guaranteed to be available in a distributed manner in the network. Our solution creatively integrates coding-theoretic designs inside of Merkle tree commitments to guarantee efficient and tamper-proof reconstruction; this solution is distinct from Asynchronous Verifiable Information Dispersal (in guaranteeing efficient proofs of malformed coding) and Coded Merkle Tree (which only provides guarantees for random corruption as opposed to our guarantees for worst-case corruption). We implement ACeD with full functionality in 6000 lines of Rust code, integrate the functionality as a smart contract into Ethereum via a high-performance implementation demonstrating up to 10,000 transactions per second in throughput and 6000x reduction in gas cost on the Ethereum testnet Kovan.