NoCo: An Efficient Transaction Propagation Protocol for Open Blockchains

In the last decade, there has been an exponential growth in the number of cryptocurrencies and the technology that underpins all the cryptocurrencies is the Blockchain. The blockchain serves as a decentralized, cryptographically signed ledger that enables payments in a trustless manner. While there are limitless applications of the blockchain, the problem that persists is the limited scaling of the blockchain. The bitcoin blockchain and the ethereum blockchain, are able to process only 7 transactions per second and 15 transactions per second respectively. All the participating mining nodes in the blockchain network perform heavy computation and compete to mine a block, but only one of them succeeds and others waste their computation. In this paper, we propose a new node count based transaction propagation protocol for less competitive mining called as NoCo. NoCo distributes a transaction from a node to the nearby miners based on the node count between them and thereby decreasing the competition, and hence this is beneficial for the miners as well as for the networks scalability. The protocol tries to parallelize the mining in the network. The protocol scales the transaction rates almost linearly.

I. Introduction

The emergence of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin [1] has given the world a model of a trustless, secure and a reliable way of transacting wealth. Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency which eliminates the need for an authority to regulate. The goal of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is to devise a system such that there is no single authority controlling the network.