Decentralized On-Chain Data Access via Smart Contracts in Ethereum Blockchain

Smart contracts in Ethereum blockchain network are self-executable scripts used for managing tokenized assets and access rights between different entities on the blockchain network. They are significant addition to blockchain technology for achieving data transparency and reliability in maintaining the digital relationship between two or more entities. However, the smart contract is in its nascent stage and suffers from various limitations, including immutability and code secrecy. In this paper, we address the inability of smart contracts to access the on-chain data. The smart contract currently fetches the on-chain data by taking external oracle assistance, which can be compromised to influence the customers. To address the issue, we propose a decentralized mechanism for accessing the blockchain data directly from the smart contracts by indexing single or multiple parameters of a transaction in each block using the Merkle-Patricia Trie (MPT). The idea is to increase the data transparency of blockchain applications. The paper provides a sequential search methodology that can retrieve transactions from
${N}$
blocks, satisfying specific conditions, in
${O}$
(
${N}$
). The complexity is further reduced to
${O}$
(
N/k
) by partitioning the blockchain data into
${k}$
disjoint subsets to achieve parallelism in the search procedure. We experimentally verify the effectiveness of the proposed methodology with a case study on the Ethereum blockchain data.