Enhancing blockchain performance via Unikraft: A case study of implementation and scalability analysis on MultiversX

Abstract

Blockchain is now becoming one of the most interesting technologies waiting to be integrated into our daily lives in relevant fields, such as health care and supply chain management. Decentralization, immutability, consensus, and transparency are some of the features that propelled the technology into mainstream territory. Since it still is in its infancy, blockchain must still overcome some important road blockers if it is to become stable enough to be embedded into indispensable applications and use cases. One of those blocking points is scalability, which is well known, and many have attempted to fix it by various methods such as sharding, consensus-protocol-based and offchain approaches. This paper proposes an analysis regarding scalability and aims to improve the speed of a blockchain node, thereby improving scalability across the whole infrastructure through the means of unikernels. For this, Unikraft has been used, an open source unikernel solution. The paper' result is twofold, on one hand we show how a blockchain node performs through a thorough evaluation section, and on the other, we delve into the application porting details and leave the evaluation for the future.