Off-chain Execution and Verification of Computationally Intensive Smart Contracts
This addresses scalability and cost issues for developers and users of blockchain-based smart contracts, offering a novel solution to a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the problem of executing computationally intensive smart contracts on Ethereum by proposing an off-chain execution and verification framework, which avoids the need for trusted execution environments and supports non-deterministic, general-purpose computations, reducing gas costs by up to 71x compared to on-chain limits.
We propose a novel framework for off-chain execution and verification of computationally-intensive smart contracts. Our framework is the first solution that avoids duplication of computing effort across multiple contractors, does not require trusted execution environments, supports computations that do not have deterministic results, and supports general-purpose computations written in a high-level language. Our experiments reveal that some intensive applications may require as much as 141 million gas, approximately 71x more than the current block gas limit for computation in Ethereum today, and can be avoided by utilizing the proposed framework.