Renoir: Accelerating Blockchain Validation using State Caching

A Blockchain system such as Ethereum is a peer to peer network
where each node works in three phases: creation, mining, and validation phases. In the creation phase, it executes a subset of locally
cached transactions to form a new block. In the mining phase, the
node solves a cryptographic puzzle (Proof of Work - PoW) on the
block it formed. On receiving a block from another peer, it starts the
validation phase, where it executes the transactions in the received
block in order to validate it. Since transactions depend on the state
that previously executed transactions have created, a node must
validate each newly arrived block before creating a new block on
top of it. A long block validation time lowers the system’s overall
throughput and brings the well known Verifier’s dilemma into play.
Additionally, this leads to wasted mining power utilization (MPU).

In this work, we present Renoir a novel mechanism that
caches state from transaction execution during the block creation
phase and reuses it to enable nodes to skip (re)executing these transactions during block validation. Renoir artifact consists of two parts: First, the extensive measurement from the production Ethereum network to check the extent of redundancy in the transaction execution during block creation and validation phase. Second, Evaluation of Renoir using different metrics(Throughput, Mining Power Utilization and Validation time) on a 50 node testbed mimicking the top 50 Ethereum miners.