Towards General-Purpose Decentralized Computing with Permissionless Extensibility

Smart contracts have emerged as the most promising foundations for applications of the blockchain technology. Even though smart contracts are expected to serve as the backbone of the next-generation web, they have several limitations that hinder their widespread adoption, namely limited computational functionality, restricted programmability, and lack of data confidentiality. Moreover, addressing these challenges manually in application-specific ways requires a lot of developer effort and time due to the monolithic architecture of smart contracts. In this dissertation, we start over with a novel architecture for building and deploying general-purpose decentralized programs. To this end, we first propose a new architecture that replaces the monolithic execution model of smart contracts with a modular one to support a rich set of functionality, which can be easily and permissionlessly extended at any time. Second, to support the efficient deterministic execution required by computationally-advanced smart contracts, we build a deterministic sandbox with floating-point arithmetic support that brings safe and deterministic execution together with general-purpose programming without having to sacrifice performance. Finally, we combine threshold cryptography and the blockchain technology to build a framework that enables mutually distrustful parties to share their confidential data in a fully auditable, transparent and decentralized manner. Through prototyping and evaluation using real-world applications, we demonstrate that it is possible and feasibly-practical to build a decentralized computing platform that can support general-purpose computations.

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2024
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Smart contract

A smart contract is a computer program or a transaction protocol that is intended to automatically execute, control or document events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement. The objectives of smart contracts are the reduction of need for trusted intermediators, arbitration costs, and fraud losses, as well as the reduction of malicious and accidental exceptions. Smart contracts are commonly associated with cryptocurrencies, and the smart contracts introduced by Ethereum are generally considered a fundamental building block for decentralized finance (DeFi) and NFT applications.

Blockchain

A blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of records (blocks) that are securely linked together via cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data (generally represented as a Merkle tree, where data nodes are represented by leaves). Since each block contains information about the previous block, they effectively form a chain (compare linked list data structure), with each additional block linking to the ones before it.

Floating-point arithmetic

In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents subsets of real numbers using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. Numbers of this form are called floating-point numbers. For example, 12.345 is a floating-point number in base ten with five digits of precision: However, unlike 12.345, 12.3456 is not a floating-point number in base ten with five digits of precision—it needs six digits of precision; the nearest floating-point number with only five digits is 12.

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ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE2023