Latency-First Smart Contract: Overclock the Blockchain for a while

Abstract

Blockchain systems can become overwhelmed by a large number of transactions, leading to increased latency. As a consequence, latency-sensitive users must bid against each other and pay higher fees to ensure that their transactions are processed in priority. However, most of the time of a blockchain system (78% in Ethereum), there is still a lot of unused computational power, with few users sending transactions. To address this issue and reduce latency for users, we propose the latency-first smart contract model in this paper, which optimistically accepts committed transactions. This allows users to submit a commitment during times of high demand, and then complete the rest of the work at a lower priority. From the perspective of the blockchain, this temporarily "overclocks" the system. We have developed a programming tool for our model, and our experiments show that the proposed latency-first smart contract model can greatly reduce latency during the periods of high demand.