Enabling secure and resource-efficient blockchain networks with VOLT

We consider the problem of creating secure and resourceefficient blockchain networks i.e., enable a group of mutually distrusting participants to efficiently share state and then agree on an append-only history of valid operations on that shared state. This paper proposes a new approach to build such blockchain networks. Our key observation is that an append-only, tamper-resistant ledger (when used as a communication medium for messages sent by participants in a blockchain network) offers a powerful primitive to build a simple, flexible, and efficient consensus protocol, which in turn serves as a solid foundation for building secure and resource-efficient blockchain networks. A key ingredient in our approach is the abstraction of a blockchain service provider (BSP), which oversees creating and updating an append-only, tamper-resistant ledger, and a new distributed protocol called Caesar consensus, which leverages the BSP’s interface to enable members of a blockchain network to reach consensus on the BSP’s ledger—even when the BSP or a threshold number of members misbehave arbitrarily. By design, the BSP is untrusted, so it can run on any untrusted infrastructure and can be optimized for better performance without affecting end-to-end security. We implement our proposal in a system called VOLT. Our experimental evaluation suggests that VOLT incurs low resource costs and provides better performance compared to alternate approaches.