Blockchains Meet Distributed Hash Tables: Decoupling Validation from State Storage
This addresses scalability and accessibility issues for users and developers in blockchain networks, though it is an incremental improvement on existing storage methods.
The paper tackles the problem of long initial synchronization times for blockchain nodes by decoupling validation from state storage, enabling mining and validation with minimal state and storing blockchain state in a distributed hash table to trade off storage and replication.
The first obstacle that regular users encounter when setting up a node for a public blockchain is the time taken for downloading all the data needed for the node to start operating correctly. In fact, this may last from hours to weeks for the major networks. Our contribution is twofold. Firstly, we show a design that enables mining and validation of new blocks keeping only a very small state. Secondly, we show that it is possible to store the state of the blockchain in a distributed hash table obtaining a wide spectrum of trade-offs between storage committed by the nodes and replication factor. Our proposal is independent from the consensus algorithm adopted, and copes well with transactions that involve smart contracts.