Nexus: A Novel Transaction Processing Framework for Permissioned Blockchain

The transaction execution layer is a key determinant of throughput in permissioned blockchains. While recent Shared Memory Pools (SMP)-based approaches improve throughput by enabling all consensus nodes to participate in transaction packaging, they face two fundamental limitations. First, the performance bottleneck shifts from the consensus layer to the transaction execution layer as transaction number confirmed in a round increases. Second, these approaches are vulnerable to “transaction duplication” attacks where malicious clients can simultaneously send the same transaction to multiple consensus nodes, thereby decreasing the number of valid transactions in block proposals. To address these limitations, this paper introducesNexus, a novel blockchain transaction processing framework with high scalability.Nexusleverages the idle computational resources of full nodes to enable transaction execution in parallel with the consensus. Moreover,Nexusallows each node to handle only a fraction of the total transactions and share execution results with others. This approach reduces overall transaction execution time, increases throughput, and decreases latency. Lastly,Nexusintroduces a transaction partitioning mechanism that effectively addresses the “transaction duplication” attack and achieves load balancing between clients and consensus nodes. Our implementation ofNexusdemonstrates significant improvements: throughput increases by 4x to 15x, and latency is reduced by 50% to 70%.