Blockchain Machine: A Network-Attached Hardware Accelerator for Hyperledger Fabric

TL;DR

This paper introduces Blockchain Machine, a hardware accelerator for Hyperledger Fabric that significantly improves validation speed and throughput by offloading block validation to FPGA-based hardware, enabling faster blockchain processing.

Contribution

It presents a novel FPGA-based hardware accelerator and communication protocol for Hyperledger Fabric, achieving up to 12x validation speedup and 68,900 transactions per second.

Findings

Up to 12x faster block validation compared to software.

Achieved throughput of 68,900 transactions per second.

Effective hardware acceleration platform for permissioned blockchains.

Abstract

In this paper, we demonstrate how Hyperledger Fabric, one of the most popular permissioned blockchains, can benefit from network-attached acceleration. The scalability and peak performance of Fabric is primarily limited by the bottlenecks present in its block validation/commit phase. We propose Blockchain Machine, a hardware accelerator coupled with a hardware-friendly communication protocol, to act as the validator peer. It can be adapted to applications and their smart contracts, and is targeted for a server with network-attached FPGA acceleration card. The Blockchain Machine retrieves blocks and their transactions in hardware directly from the network interface, which are then validated through a configurable and efficient block-level and transaction-level pipeline. The validation results are then transferred to the host CPU where non-bottleneck operations are executed. From our implementation integrated with Fabric v1.4 LTS, we observed up to 12x speedup in block validation when compared to software-only validator peer, with commit throughput of up to 68,900 tps. Our work provides an acceleration platform that will foster further research on hardware acceleration of permissioned blockchains.