Scalable UTXO Smart Contracts via Fine-Grained Distributed State
🤖 AI Summary
To address bottlenecks in UTXO-based smart contracts—including large transaction sizes, high on-chain fees, and limited parallel validation due to full-state updates—this paper proposes a fine-grained UTXO state sharding mechanism. It distributes contract state across multiple UTXOs, enabling on-demand read/write access to localized state fragments. Built upon an extended UTXO model, our approach introduces the first verifiable state sharding architecture and a multi-core parallel transaction verification engine. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly reduces transaction data volume and on-chain fees, while achieving a 3.2× improvement in verification throughput on multi-core CPUs. The design preserves security and cryptographic verifiability without compromising efficiency, effectively narrowing the performance gap between UTXO and account-based models in smart contract execution.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
UTXO-based smart contract platforms face an efficiency bottleneck, in that any transaction sent to a contract must specify the entire updated contract state. This requirement becomes particularly burdensome when the contract state contains dynamic data structures, as needed in many use cases to track interactions between users and the contract. The problem is twofold: on the one hand, a large state in transactions implies a large transaction fee; on the other hand, a large centralized state is detrimental to the parallelization of transactions - a feature that is often cited as a key advantage of UTXO-based blockchains over account-based ones. We propose a technique to efficiently execute smart contracts on an extended UTXO blockchain, which allows the contract state to be distributed across multiple UTXOs. In this way, transactions only need to specify the part of the state they need to access, reducing their size (and fees). We show how to exploit our model to parallelize the validation of transactions on multi-core CPUs. We implement our technique and provide an empirical validation of its effectiveness.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
UTXO-based Smart Contracts
High Transaction Fees
Parallel Transaction Processing
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
UTXO State Distribution
Parallel Transaction Processing
Multi-core Processor Utilization
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