Setchain: Improving Blockchain Scalability with Byzantine Distributed Sets and Barriers

Blockchain technologies are facing a scalability challenge, which must be overcome to guarantee a wider adoption of the technology. This scalability issue is due to the use of consensus algorithms to guarantee the total order of the chain of blocks (and of the transactions within each block). However, total order is often overkilling, since important advanced applications of smart-contracts do not require a total order among all operations. A much higher scalability can potentially be achieved if a more relaxed order (instead of a total order) can be exploited. In this paper, we propose a distributed concurrent data type, called Setchain, which improves scalability significantly. A Setchain implements a grow-only set object whose elements are not ordered, unlike conventional blockchain operations. When convenient, the Setchain allows forcing a synchronization barrier that assigns permanently an epoch number to a subset of the latest elements added. Therefore, two operations in the same epoch are not ordered, while two operations in different epochs are ordered by their respective epoch number. We present different Byzantine-tolerant implementations of Setchain, prove their correctness and report on an empirical evaluation of a prototype implementation. Our results show that Setchain is orders of magnitude faster than consensus-based ledgers, since it implements grow-only sets with epoch synchronization instead of total order. Moreover, since the Setchain barriers can be synchronized with the underlying blockchain, Setchain objects can be used as a sidechain to implement many smart contract solutions with much faster operations than on basic blockchains.