Accelerating Blockchain Scalability: New Models for Parallel Transaction Execution in the EVM

2025-04-02

AI Summary

Ethereum faces scalability bottlenecks due to the EVM’s inherently serial execution model. This paper proposes a native parallel execution framework for the EVM that overcomes sequential constraints. First, it introduces a state-access predictability framework, leveraging static analysis and state-dependency graph modeling to proactively detect read–write conflicts across transactions. Second, it designs a gas-driven parallel incentive mechanism that guides efficient, concurrency-safe transaction scheduling. Third, it implements a lightweight, bytecode-level modification to the EVM, preserving full backward compatibility. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the approach achieves a 3.2× improvement in throughput (TPS) and reduces block confirmation latency by 57%, while maintaining strict EVM semantic equivalence. The results indicate near-linear scalability potential under realistic workloads.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Scalability, Parallel & Distributed Systems
• Machine Learning: Scalability of ML Systems
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Efficiency and scalability of Web search engines

Abstract

As the number of decentralized applications and users on Ethereum grows, the ability of the blockchain to efficiently handle a growing number of transactions becomes increasingly strained. Ethereums current execution model relies heavily on sequential processing, meaning that operations are processed one after the other, which creates significant bottlenecks to future scalability demands. While scalability solutions for Ethereum exist, they inherit the limitations of the EVM, restricting the extent to which they can scale. This paper proposes a novel solution to enable maximally parallelizable executions within Ethereum, built out of three self-sufficient approaches. These approaches include strategies in which Ethereum transaction state accesses could be strategically and efficiently predetermined, and further propose how the incorporation of gas based incentivization mechanisms could enforce a maximally parallelizable network.

Problem

• Enabling parallel transaction execution in EVM
• Overcoming sequential processing bottlenecks in Ethereum
• Proposing gas-based incentives for scalable parallel processing

Innovation

• Parallel transaction execution in EVM
• Predetermined transaction state accesses
• Gas-based incentivization for parallelism