Jiaping Wang

Executive Director at Sinovation Ventures, Formerly Lead Researcher at Microsoft Research.

Cryptocurrencies have provided a promising infrastructure for pseudonymous online payments. However, low throughput has significantly hindered the scalability and usability of cryptocurrency systems for increasing numbers of users and transactions. Another obstacle to achieving scalability is that every node is required to duplicate the communication, storage, and state representation of the entire network.

In this paper, we introduce the Asynchronous Consensus Zones, which scales blockchain system linearly without compromising decentralization or security. We achieve this by running multiple independent and parallel instances of single-chain consensus (zones). The consensus happens independently within each zone with minimized communication, which partitions the workload of the entire network and ensures moderate burden for each individual node as network grows. We propose eventual atomicity to ensure transaction atomicity across zones, which guarantees the efficient completion of transaction without the overhead of two-phase commit protocol. We also propose Chu-ko-nu mining to ensure the effective mining power in each zone is at the same level of the entire network, and makes an attack on any individual zone as hard as that on the entire network. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of our work. On a test-bed including 1,200 virtual machines worldwide to support 48,000 nodes, our system deliver 1,000× throughput and 2,000× capacity over Bitcoin and Ethereum network.