ACE: Asynchronous and Concurrent Execution of Complex Smart Contracts
Abstract
Smart contracts are programmable, decentralized and transparent financial applications. Because smart contract platforms typically support Turing-complete programming languages, such systems are often said to enable arbitrary applications. However, the current permissionless smart contract systems impose heavy restrictions on the types of computations that can be implemented. For example, the globally-replicated and sequential execution model of Ethereum requires low gas limits that make many computations infeasible.
In this paper, we propose a novel system called ACE whose main goal is to enable more complex smart contracts on permissionless blockchains. ACE is based on an off-chain execution model where the contract issuers appoint a set of service providers to execute the contract code independent from the consensus layer. The primary advantage of ACE over previous solutions is that it allows one contract to safely call another contract that is executed by a different set of service providers. Thus, ACE is the first solution to enable off-chain execution of interactive smart contracts with flexible trust assumptions. Our evaluation shows that ACE enables several orders of magnitude more complex smart contracts than standard Ethereum.
Research Area: Decentralized Systems
People
BibTex
@INPROCEEDINGS{wüst2020asynchronous,
isbn = {978-1-4503-7089-9},
doi = {10.1145/3372297.3417243},
year = {2020-10},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security},
type = {Conference Paper},
author = {Wüst, Karl and Matetic, Sinisa and Egli, Silvan and Kostiainen, Kari and Capkun, Srdjan},
abstract = {Smart contracts are programmable, decentralized and transparent financial applications. Because smart contract platforms typically support Turing-complete programming languages, such systems are often said to enable arbitrary applications. However, the current permissionless smart contract systems impose heavy restrictions on the types of computations that can be implemented. For example, the globally-replicated and sequential execution model of Ethereum requires low gas limits that make many computations infeasible.In this paper, we propose a novel system called ACE whose main goal is to enable more complex smart contracts on permissionless blockchains. ACE is based on an off-chain execution model where the contract issuers appoint a set of service providers to execute the contract code independent from the consensus layer. The primary advantage of ACE over previous solutions is that it allows one contract to safely call another contract that is executed by a different set of service providers. Thus, ACE is the first solution to enable off-chain execution of interactive smart contracts with flexible trust assumptions. Our evaluation shows that ACE enables several orders of magnitude more complex smart contracts than standard Ethereum.},
keywords = {Blockchain; Smart contracts; Scalability; Security and privacy; Systems security},
language = {en},
address = {New York, NY},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
title = {ACE: Asynchronous and Concurrent Execution of Complex Smart Contracts},
PAGES = {587 - 600},
Note = {27th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2020) (virtual); Conference Location: Online; Conference Date: November 9-13, 2020; Due to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) the conference was conducted virtually.}
}Research Collection: 20.500.11850/452997