Back to the Future: Rethinking Endorsement in Order-Execute Blockchains

Abstract

Due to regulatory compliance and governance management, modern (permissioned) blockchains require flexible endorsement, which allows the endorsement policy for each contract or state object to be individually defined. To enable flexible endorsement, Hyperledger Fabric employs an execute-order-validate (EOV) paradigm, in which transactions first undergo speculative execution and endorsement, and are only then ordered and validated. Meanwhile, most blockchain systems, including the platform targeted in this work (i.e., ChainMaker), still follow a conflict-free order-execute framework. We argue that the EOV paradigm still faces several limitations, notably high abort rates in high-contention workloads such as those in Decentralized Finance (DeFi). To avoid refactoring our system and better suit DeFi applications, we try to integrate flexible endorsement into the classical order-execute architecture and accordingly propose a new framework. The key challenge is to deterministically remove problematic transactions from an ordered list, while preserving censorship resistance and decentralization for the remaining ones. We instantiate this framework on top of Tendermint, a seminal Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocol adopted in our system, and thereby propose FlexTender. By elegantly embedding endorsements into consensus, FlexTender incurs no additional messaging overhead in the normal case. Empirical evaluation using an Ethereum USDT workload demonstrates that FlexTender achieves up to $10.6\times$ speedup in throughput over an EOV simulation on the same platform.