Microcosm: A Scalable Transaction Processing Scheme for Modular Blockchain (Industry Track)

Application-specific blockchains are gaining popularity over general-purpose blockchains which require multiple services to share network resources. These blockchains adopt a modular architecture that allocates specific tasks to distinct layers, optimizing each layer for its designated role. While modular blockchains offer advantages, such as enhanced performance and flexibility, over general-purpose blockchains, they may exhibit low performance when attempting to achieve fast block finality. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose an efficient transaction processing scheme, Microcosm, to enhance the performance of the modular blockchain. Firstly, we propose fine-grained locking mechanisms to enable concurrent verification of unconfirmed transactions. Secondly, we enhance the efficiency of block execution by separating the transaction verification procedures and processing them in parallel. We implement Microcosm based on Tendermint and Cosmos-SDK, and our experimental results demonstrate that Microcosm provides a performance improvement by up to 2.3×, 1.7×, and 1.9× compared with a vanilla version of Cosmos, Osmosis, and Celestia known as some of the most popular modular blockchains, respectively.