CompactChain: an efficient stateless chain for UTXO-model blockchain

Abstract

In this work, we propose a stateless blockchain called CompactChain, which compacts the entire state of the UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) based blockchain systems into two RSA accumulators. The first accumulator is called Transaction Output (TXO) commitment which represents the TXO set. The second one is called Spent Transaction Output (STXO) commitment which represents the STXO set. In this work, we discuss three algorithms: (i) To update the TXO and STXO commitments by the miner. The miner also provides the proofs for the correctness of the updated commitments; (ii) To prove the transaction’s validity by providing a membership witness in TXO commitment and non-membership witness against STXO commitment for a coin being spent by a user; (iii) To update the witness for the coin that is not yet spent; The experimental results evaluate the performance of the CompactChain in terms of time taken by a miner to update the commitments and time taken by a validator to verify the commitments and validate the transactions. We compare the performance of CompactChain with the existing state-of-the-art works on stateless blockchains. CompactChain shows a reduction in commitments update complexity and transaction witness size which inturn reduces the mempool size and propagation latency without compromising the system throughput (Transactions per second (TPS)).

Graphical abstract

Keywords

stateless blockchain / RSA Accumulator / STXO commitment / TXO commitment / UTXO / Non-interactive Proof of Exponentiation (NI-PoE) / Transactions per second (TPS)

B Swaroopa Reddy is currently pursuing the PhD degree in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India from 2017. He received the BTech degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Sri Krishnadevaraya University, India in 2009. From 2010 to 2017, he was with the Bharath Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), a Public Sector Unit under the Government of India. His research interests include scalability of Blockchain Networks, Privacy and Security in Blockchain, ZK-Rollups, Decentralized Identities (DiD) and Verifiable Credentials (VC)

T Uday Kiran Reddy is currently pursuing the BTech degree in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India from 2019. His current research interests include the areas of Stochastic Optimisation, Signal Processing, Machine Learning and Blockchain

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the project Indigenous 5G Test Bed (Building an end to end 5G Test Bed) in India, Dept. of Telecommunication Networks & Technologies (NT) Cell, Government of India. We are extremely grateful for the insightful, helpful and detailed comments of the reviewers. The feedback helps us stay motivated and think more in-depth about the proposed stateless blockchain model and improving this paper.

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2024 Higher Education Press