AWeb of Blocks Technical Report

Blockchains o‚er a useful abstraction: a trustworthy, decentralized log of totally ordered transactions. Traditional blockchains have problems with scalability and eciency, preventing their use for many applications. Œese limitations arise from the requirement that all participants agree on the total ordering of transactions. To address this fundamental shortcoming, we introduce Charloˆe, a system for maintaining decentralized, authenticated data structures, including transaction logs. Each data structure—indeed, each block—speci€es its own availability and integrity properties, allowing CharloŠe applications to retain the full bene€ts of permissioned or permissionless blockchains. In CharloŠe, a block can be atomically appended to multiple logs, allowing applications to be interoperable when they want to, without ineciently forcing all applications to share one big log. We call this open graph of interconnected blocks a blockweb. We allow new kinds of blockweb applications that operate beyond traditional chains. We demonstrate the viability of CharloŠe applications with proof-of-concept servers running interoperable blockchains. Using performance data from our prototype, we estimate that when compared with traditional blockchains, CharloŠe o‚ers multiple orders of magnitude improvement in speed and energy eciency.