Efficient High Performance FPGA based NoSQL Caching System for Blockchain Scalability and Throughput Improvement

Abstract

Blockchain inspires many people across the globe and has started getting many adoptions after realizing its promising benefits through successful trials. Applications of blockchain range from cryptocurrency, smart contract, banking, healthcare and identity management, insurance, land registry to IoT industry. However, scalability and throughput issues are major challenges of blockchain and are less researched. Many lightweight nodes especially IoT devices depend and put much workload on blockchain servers since they cannot store the full blockchain due to its huge size. This paper investigates performance bottlenecks in blockchain and presents efficient high performance system for caching the blockchain data in the FPGA network interface controller (NIC) for improving scalability and throughput of blockchain applications. We design a customized SHA-256 hash core specific for efficient blockchain caching to save hashing executions and improve the performance. We built and use Jansson and Curl libraries to interface our system with real Bitcoin core. We finally evaluate the throughput performance of the Bitcoin core. The overall result revealed that our system improves the throughput performance by 103 times when cache hit. The design also offers small work area utilization, low power consumption and higher performance.