A true concurrent model of smart contracts executions
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One of the key features of modern blockchain platforms is the possibility of executing smart contracts, i.e. computer programs that transfer digital assets between users, according to pre-agreed rules. Crucially, the execution of smart contracts must be correct even in the presence of (a minority of) adversaries in the peer-to-peer network that maintains the blockchain. To enforce this property without a trusted authority, the nodes follow a consensus protocol, which determines which node can extend the blockchain at each moment. To this aim, nodes first collect a set of transactions from the network, representing the actions on the smart contracts required by users. Then, to compute the new state of the smart contracts, they put these transactions in sequence (in an arbitrary order), and execute them serially. Once this block of transactions is appended to the blockchain, the other nodes of the network validate it, by re-executing the transactions in the same order. The serial execution of transactions does not take advantage of the multi-core architecture of modern processors, so contributing to limit the throughput of blockchains. In this paper we devise a static analysis technique for parallelizing the execution of transactions, in a formal setting based on Ethereum, the most widespread platform for smart contracts.
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