Abstract
Smart contracts in Ethereum are executable programs deployed on the blockchain, which require a client for their execution. When a client executes a smart contract, a world state containing contract storage and account details is changed in a consistent fashion. Hence, the execution of smart contracts must be sequential to ensure a deterministic representation of the world state. Due to recent growth, the world state has been bloated, making testing and profiling of Ethereum transactions at scale very difficult. In this work, we introduce a novel off-the-chain execution environment for scalable testing and profiling of smart contracts. We disconnect transactions from the world state by using substates to execute the transactions in isolation and in parallel. Compared to an Ethereum client, our execution environment reduces the space required to replay the transactions of the initial 9M blocks from 700:11GB to 285:39GB. We increased throughput from 620:62 tx=s to 2;817:98 tx=s (single-threaded) and 30;168:76 tx=s (scaled to 44 cores). We demonstrate the scalability of our off-the-chain execution environment for hard-fork testing, metric evaluations of smart contracts, and contract fuzzing.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | 2021 USENIX Annual Technical Conference |
| Publisher | USENIX Association |
| Pages | 349-363 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781939133236 |
| Publication status | Published - 2021 |
| Event | 2021 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, ATC 2021 - Virtual, Online Duration: 2021 Jul 14 → 2021 Jul 16 |
Publication series
| Name | 2021 USENIX Annual Technical Conference |
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Conference
| Conference | 2021 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, ATC 2021 |
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| City | Virtual, Online |
| Period | 21/7/14 → 21/7/16 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by Fantom Foundation, by the Australian Government through the ARC Discovery Project funding scheme (DP210101984), by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Korean government (MSIT) under Grant No. 2019R1F1A1062576, and by the Next-Generation Information Computing Development Program through the NRF, funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning under Grant No. NRF-2015M3C4A7065522.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 USENIX Annual Technical Conference. All rights reserved.
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Computer Science(all)