XOX Fabric: A hybrid approach to blockchain transaction execution

Abstract

Performance and scalability are major concerns for blockchains: permissionless systems are typically limited by slow proof of X consensus algorithms and sequential post-order transaction execution on every node of the network. By introducing a small amount of trust in their participants, permissioned blockchain systems such as Hyperledger Fabric can benefit from more efficient consensus algorithms and make use of parallel pre-order execution on a subset of network nodes. Fabric, in particular, has been shown to handle tens of thousands of transactions per second. However, this performance is only achievable for contention-free transaction workloads. If many transactions compete for a small set of hot keys in the world state, the effective throughput drops drastically. We therefore propose XOX: a novel two-pronged transaction execution approach that both minimizes invalid transactions in the Fabric blockchain and maximizes concurrent execution. Our approach additionally prevents unintentional denial of service attacks by clients re-submitting conflicting transactions. Even under fully contentious workloads, XOX can handle more than 3000 transactions per second, all of which would be discarded by regular Fabric.