EVMx: An FPGA-Based Smart Contract Processing Unit

TL;DR

This paper introduces EVMx, an FPGA-based smart contract processing unit that significantly accelerates execution speed, reducing processing time by up to 99% compared to traditional CPU-based systems, thereby improving blockchain performance.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel FPGA-based hardware architecture for executing Ethereum smart contracts, achieving substantial speedups over existing CPU-based implementations.

Findings

Execution time reduced by up to 99% for common opcodes.

Ethereum block processing is up to 6 times faster with EVMx.

Hardware acceleration significantly improves EVM-compatible blockchain performance.

Abstract

Ethereum blockchain uses smart contracts (SCs) to implement decentralized applications (dApps). SCs are executed by the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) running within an Ethereum client. Moreover, the EVM has been widely adopted by other blockchain platforms, including Solana, Cardano, Avalanche, Polkadot, and more. However, the EVM performance is limited by the constraints of the general-purpose computer it operates on. This work proposes offloading SC execution onto a dedicated hardware-based EVM. Specifically, EVMx is an FPGA-based SC execution engine that benefits from the inherent parallelism and high-speed processing capabilities of a hardware architecture. Synthesis results demonstrate a reduction in execution time of 61% to 99% for commonly used operation codes compared to CPU-based SC execution environments. Moreover, the execution time of Ethereum blocks on EVMx is up to 6x faster compared to analogous works in the literature. These results highlight the potential of the proposed architecture to accelerate SC execution and enhance the performance of EVM-compatible blockchains.