Stateful Layered Chain Model to Improve the Scalability of Bitcoin

Abstract

Bitcoin is a digital cryptocurrency which had become the focus of scientific research in the modern era. Blockchain is the underlying technology of Bitcoin because of its decentralization, transparency, trust-less, and immutability features. However, blockchain can be considered the cause of Bitcoin scalability issues especially storage. Nodes in Bitcoin network need to store the full blockchain to validate transactions. By time, the blockchain size will be extremely huge. So, the full nodes will prefer to leave the network, and this leads to the blockchain being centralized and trusted. Therefore, security will be adversely affected. In this paper, we propose a Stateful Layered Chain Model which is based on storing accounts’ balances to reduce the size of the Bitcoin blockchain. This model changes the structure of the traditional blockchain from blocks to layers. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed model reduces the size of blockchain by about 50.6%. Imlicitly, the transaction throughput can also be nearly doubled.