Block-STM: Scaling Blockchain Execution by Turning Ordering Curse to a Performance Blessing

TL;DR

Block-STM is a parallel execution engine for smart contracts that leverages transaction ordering to improve throughput and conflict detection, achieving significant performance gains in blockchain benchmarks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, low-overhead collaborative scheduler that turns the ordering constraint into a performance advantage for blockchain transaction execution.

Findings

Achieves up to 170k tps in Aptos benchmarks

Outperforms sequential baseline by 20x and 17x with 32 threads

Effective in both low and high conflict workloads

Abstract

Block-STM is a parallel execution engine for smart contracts, built around the principles of Software Transactional Memory. Transactions are grouped in blocks, and every execution of the block must yield the same deterministic outcome. Block-STM further enforces that the outcome is consistent with executing transactions according to a preset order, leveraging this order to dynamically detect dependencies and avoid conflicts during speculative transaction execution. At the core of Block-STM is a novel, low-overhead collaborative scheduler of execution and validation tasks. Block-STM is implemented on the main branch of the Diem Blockchain code-base and runs in production at Aptos. Our evaluation demonstrates that Block-STM is adaptive to workloads with different conflict rates and utilizes the inherent parallelism therein. Block-STM achieves up to $110k$ tps in the Diem benchmarks and up to $170k$ tps in the Aptos Benchmarks, which is a $20$x and $17$x improvement over the sequential baseline with $32$ threads, respectively. The throughput on a contended workload is up to $50k$ tps and $80k$ tps in Diem and Aptos benchmarks, respectively.