A Blockchain Consensus Protocol With Horizontal Scalability

Title

A Blockchain Consensus Protocol With Horizontal Scalability

 Author

Cong, Kelong (TU Delft Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Contributor

Epema, Dick (graduation committee)
Pouwelse, Johan (mentor)
Erkin, Zekeriya (graduation committee)

Degree granting institution

Delft University of Technology

 Date

2017-08-31

 Abstract

Blockchain systems have the potential to decentralise many traditionally centralised systems. However, scalability remains a key challenge. Without a horizontally scalable solution, where performance increases by adding more nodes to the system, blockchain systems remain unsuitable for ubiquitous use. We design a novel blockchain system called Checo. Each node in our system maintains a personal hash chain, which only stores transactions that the node is involved in. A consensus is reached on special blocks called checkpoint blocks rather than on all the transactions. Checkpoint blocks are effectively a hash pointer to the personal hash chains; thus a single checkpoint block may represent an arbitrarily large set of transactions. We introduce a validation protocol so that any node can check the validity of any transaction. Since it is a point-to-point protocol, we achieve horizontal scalability. We analytically evaluate our system and proof a number of highly desirable correctness properties. Further, we give a free and open-source implementation of Checo and evaluate it experimentally. Our results show a strong indication of horizontal scalability.

 Subject

blockchain
consensus
distributed systems

 To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:86b2d4d8-642e-4d0f-8fc7-d7a2e331e0e9

 Part of collection

Student theses

 Document type

master thesis

 Rights

© 2017 Kelong Cong
Files
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