QMDB: Quick Merkle Database

TL;DR

QMDB is a high-performance, scalable Merkle database that significantly improves blockchain state management throughput, supports massive workloads, and introduces historical proofs for blockchain querying.

Contribution

It integrates key-value and Merkle tree storage into a unified architecture, achieving unprecedented throughput and scalability for blockchain applications.

Findings

Up to 6X throughput over RocksDB

Supports 1 million TPS on a single server

Scales to 280 billion entries on one machine

Abstract

Quick Merkle Database (QMDB) addresses longstanding bottlenecks in blockchain state management by integrating key-value (KV) and Merkle tree storage into a single unified architecture. QMDB delivers a significant throughput improvement over existing architectures, achieving up to 6X over the widely used RocksDB and 8X over NOMT, a leading verifiable database. Its novel append-only twig-based design enables one SSD read per state access, O(1) IOs for updates, and in-memory Merkleization on a memory footprint as small as 2.3 bytes per entry, enabling it to run on even modest consumer-grade PCs. QMDB scales seamlessly across both commodity and enterprise hardware, achieving up to 2.28 million state updates per second. This performance enables support for 1 million token transfers per second (TPS), marking QMDB as the first solution achieving such a milestone. QMDB has been benchmarked with workloads exceeding 15 billion entries (10X Ethereum's 2024 state) and has proven the capacity to scale to 280 billion entries on a single server. Furthermore, QMDB introduces historical proofs, unlocking the ability to query its blockchain's historical state at the latest block. QMDB not only meets the demands of current blockchains but also provides a robust foundation for building scalable, efficient, and verifiable decentralized applications across diverse use cases.