EventWarden: A Decentralized Event-driven Proxy Service for Outsourcing Arbitrary Transactions in Ethereum-like Blockchains

Transactions represent a fundamental component in blockchains as they are the primary means for users to change the blockchain state. Current blockchain systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum require users to constantly observe the state changes of interest or the events taking place in a blockchain and requires the user to explicitly release the required transactions to respond to the observed events in the blockchain. This paper proposes EventWarden, a decentralized event-driven proxy service for users to outsource transactions in Ethereum-like blockchains. EventWarden employs a novel combination of smart contracts and blockchain logs. EventWarden allows a user to create a proxy smart contract that specifies an interested event and also reserves an arbitrary transaction to release. Upon observing the occurrence of the prescribed event, anyone in the Blockchain network can call the proxy contract to earn the service fee reserved in the contract by proving to the contract that the event has been recorded into blockchain logs, which then automatically triggers the proxy contract to release the reserved transaction. We show that the reserved transaction can only get released from the proxy contract when the prescribed event has taken place. We also demonstrate that as long as a single member in the Blockchain network is incentivized by the service fee to call the proxy contract after the prescribed event has taken place, the reserved transaction is guaranteed to get released. We implement EventWarden over the Ethereum official test network. The results demonstrate that EventWarden is effective and is ready-to-use in practice.