MulChain: Enabling Advanced Cross-Modal Queries in Hybrid-Storage Blockchains
Zhiyuan Peng, Xin Yin, Gang Wang, Chenhao Ying, Wei Chen, Xikun Jiang,, Yibin Xu, Yuan Luo

TL;DR
MulChain introduces a middleware solution with a novel data structure to enable advanced multimodal data queries on blockchains without modifying their core architecture, addressing storage and performance challenges.
Contribution
The paper presents MulChain, a middleware architecture with BHashTree, facilitating efficient multimodal queries on blockchains while maintaining compatibility and minimizing resource consumption.
Findings
BHashTree adapts dynamically to workload changes for efficient data management.
MulChain achieves high query performance with low gas consumption.
Middleware provides standardized query interfaces across blockchain platforms.
Abstract
With its decentralization and immutability, blockchain has emerged as a trusted foundation for data management and querying. Because blockchain storage space is limited, large multimodal data files, such as videos, are often stored offline, leaving only lightweight metadata on the chain. While this hybrid storage approach enhances storage efficiency, it introduces significant challenges for executing advanced queries on multimodal data. The metadata stored on-chain is often minimal and may not include all the attributes necessary for queries like time range or fuzzy queries. In addition, existing blockchains do not provide native support for multimodal data querying. Achieving this capability would necessitate extensive modifications to the underlying blockchain framework, even reconstructing its core architecture. Consequently, enabling blockchains with multimodal query capabilities…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCaching and Content Delivery · Blockchain Technology Applications and Security · Advanced Data Storage Technologies
