Stingray: Fast Concurrent Transactions Without Consensus

TL;DR

Stingray is a blockchain architecture that enables fast, concurrent processing of nearly commutative and multi-party transactions, significantly improving throughput and contention recovery speed.

Contribution

It introduces a replicated bounded counter and a FastUnlock protocol, enabling concurrent processing and rapid contention recovery in blockchain systems.

Findings

Achieves 10,000x throughput increase over prior systems for commutative workloads.

Proves security in asynchronous Byzantine fault model.

Demonstrates effectiveness on a global testbed.

Abstract

Recent advances have improved the throughput and latency of blockchains by processing transactions accessing different parts of the state concurrently. However, these systems are unable to concurrently process (a) transactions accessing the same state, even if they are (almost) commutative, e.g., payments much smaller than an account's balance, and (b) multi-party transactions, e.g., asset swaps. Moreover, they are slow to recover from contention, requiring once-in-a-day synchronization. We present Stingray, a novel blockchain architecture that addresses these limitations. The key conceptual contributions are a replicated bounded counter that processes (almost) commutative transactions concurrently, and a FastUnlock protocol that uses a fallback consensus protocol for fast contention recovery. We prove Stingray's security in an asynchronous network with Byzantine faults and demonstrate on a global testbed that Stingray achieves 10,000 times the throughput of prior systems for commutative workloads.