Tuxedo: Maximizing Smart Contract Computation in PoW Blockchains

Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchains typically allocate only a tiny fraction (e.g., less than 1% for Ethereum) of the average interarrival time (I) between blocks for validating smart contracts present in transactions. In such systems, block validation and PoW mining are typically performed sequentially, the former by CPUs and the latter by ASICs. A trivial increase in validation time (τ) introduces the popularly known Verifier's Dilemma, and as we demonstrate, causes more forking and hurts fairness. Large τ also reduces the tolerance for safety against a Byzantine adversary. Solutions that offload validation to a set of non-chain nodes (a.k.a. off-chain approaches) suffer from trust and performance issues that are non-trivial to resolve. In this paper, we present Tuxedo, the first on-chain protocol to theoretically scale τ/I ≈1 in PoW blockchains. The key innovation in Tuxedo is to perform CPU-based block processing in parallel to ASIC mining. We achieve this by allowing miners to delay validation of transactions in a block by up to ζ blocks, where ζ is a system parameter. We perform security analysis of Tuxedo considering all possible adversarial strategies in a synchronous network with maximum end-to-end delay Δ and demonstrate that Tuxedo achieves security equivalent to known results for longest chain PoW Nakamoto consensus. Our prototype implementation of Tuxedo atop Ethereum demonstrates that it can scale τ without suffering the harmful effects of naive scaling up of τ/I in existing blockchains