EC-Chain: Cost-Effective Storage Solution for Permissionless Blockchains

TL;DR

EC-Chain offers a novel, cost-effective storage solution for permissionless blockchains by combining optimized erasure coding, a dual-trie state management system, and a network maintenance scheme, significantly reducing storage needs.

Contribution

It introduces EC-Chain, integrating batch and height-based encoding with a dual-trie system and a network scheme to address blockchain storage challenges.

Findings

Achieves over 90% storage reduction compared to Ethereum Geth.

Enhances storage efficiency through novel encoding and state management techniques.

Provides a scalable solution for permissionless blockchain storage issues.

Abstract

Permissionless blockchains face considerable challenges due to increasing storage demands, driven by the proliferation of Decentralized Applications (DApps). This paper introduces EC-Chain, a cost-effective storage solution for permissionless blockchains. EC-Chain reduces storage overheads of ledger and state data, which comprise blockchain data. For ledger data, EC-Chain refines existing erasure coding-based storage optimization techniques by incorporating batch encoding and height-based encoding. We also introduce an easy-to-implement dual-trie state management system that enhances state storage and retrieval through state expiry, mining, and creation procedures. To ensure data availability in permissionless environments, EC-Chain introduces a network maintenance scheme tailored for dynamism. Collectively, these contributions allow EC-Chain to provide an effective solution to the storage challenges faced by permissionless blockchains. Our evaluation demonstrates that EC-Chain can achieve a storage reduction of over \(90\%\) compared to native Ethereum Geth.