DiPETrans: A Framework for Distributed Parallel Execution of Transactions of Blocks in Blockchain

Contemporary blockchain such as Bitcoin and Ethereum execute transactions serially by miners and validators and determine the Proof-of-Work (PoW). Such serial execution is unable to exploit modern multi-core resources efficiently, hence limiting the system throughput and increasing the transaction acceptance latency. The objective of this work is to increase the transaction throughput by introducing parallel transaction execution using a static analysis technique. We propose a framework DiPETrans for the distributed execution of the transactions in a block. Here, peers in the blockchain network form a community to execute the transactions and find the PoW parallelly, using a leader-follower approach. During mining, the leader statically analyzes the transactions, creates different groups (shards) of independent transactions, and distributes them to followers to execute them in parallel. After the transaction executes, the community's compute power is utilized to solve the PoW concurrently. When a block is successfully created, the leader broadcasts the proposed block to other peers in the network for validation. On receiving a block, validators re-execute the block transactions and accept the block if they reach the same state as shared by the miner. Validation can also be done as a community, in parallel, following the same leader-follower approach as mining. We report experiments using over 5 Million real transactions from the Ethereum blockchain and execute them using our DiPETrans framework to empirically validate the benefits of our techniques over traditional sequential execution. We achieve a maximum speedup of 2.2x for the miner and 2.0x for the validator, with 100 to 500 transactions per block. Further, we achieve a peak of 5x end-to-end block creation speedup using a parallel miner over a serial miner when using 6 machines in the community.