NimbleChain: Speeding up cryptocurrencies in general-purpose permissionless blockchains

Abstract

Nakamoto's seminal work gave rise to permissionless blockchains -- as well as a wide range of proposals to mitigate their performance shortcomings. Despite substantial throughput and energy efficiency achievements, most proposals only bring modest (or marginal) gains in transaction commit latency. Consequently, commit latencies in today's permissionless blockchain landscape remain prohibitively high. This paper proposes NimbleChain, a novel algorithm that extends permissionless blockchains based on Nakamoto consensus with a fast path that delivers causal promises of commitment, or simply promises. Since promises only partially order transactions, their latency is only a small fraction of the totally-ordered commitment latency of Nakamoto consensus. Still, the weak consistency guarantees of promises are strong enough to correctly implement cryptocurrencies. To the best of our knowledge, NimbleChain is the first system to bring together fast, partially-ordered transactions with consensus-based, totally-ordered transactions in a permissionless setting. This hybrid consistency model is able to speed up cryptocurrency transactions while still supporting smart contracts, which typically have (strong) sequential consistency needs. We implement NimbleChain as an extension of Ethereum and evaluate it in a 500-node geo-distributed deployment. The results show NimbleChain can promise a cryptocurrency transactions up to an order of magnitude faster than a vanilla Ethereum implementation, with marginal overheads.