1. The cost of immortality: A Time To Live for smart contracts
- Author
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Dimitri SAINGRE, Thomas Ledoux, Jean-Marc Menaud, Département Automatique, Productique et Informatique (IMT Atlantique - DAPI), IMT Atlantique Bretagne-Pays de la Loire (IMT Atlantique), Institut Mines-Télécom [Paris] (IMT)-Institut Mines-Télécom [Paris] (IMT), Software Stack for Massively Geo-Distributed Infrastructures (STACK), Inria Rennes – Bretagne Atlantique, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes (LS2N), Institut Mines-Télécom [Paris] (IMT)-Institut Mines-Télécom [Paris] (IMT)-Université de Nantes - UFR des Sciences et des Techniques (UN UFR ST), Université de Nantes (UN)-Université de Nantes (UN)-École Centrale de Nantes (ECN)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-IMT Atlantique Bretagne-Pays de la Loire (IMT Atlantique), Université de Nantes (UN)-Université de Nantes (UN)-École Centrale de Nantes (ECN)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), This paper has been financed by the HYDDA FSN project., GRID5000, IMT Atlantique (IMT Atlantique), Software Stack for Massively Geo-Distributed Infrastructures (LS2N - équipe STACK), Université de Nantes - UFR des Sciences et des Techniques (UN UFR ST), Université de Nantes (UN)-Université de Nantes (UN)-École Centrale de Nantes (ECN)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-IMT Atlantique (IMT Atlantique), and Experiments presented in this paper were carried out us-ing the Grid’5000 testbed, supported by a scientific inter-est group hosted by Inria and including CNRS, RENATERand several Universities as well as other organizations (seehttps://www.grid5000.fr).This paper has been financed by the HYDDA FSN project
- Subjects
Ethereum ,[INFO.INFO-PF]Computer Science [cs]/Performance [cs.PF] ,Blockchain ,smart-contracts ,Time-to-live ,[INFO.INFO-DC]Computer Science [cs]/Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing [cs.DC] ,performances - Abstract
International audience; Smart contracts, scripts at the heart of blockchainbased applications, are meant to be available forever once deployed. However, this property has a price. The amount of space required to store new contracts keeps increasing. This increase impacts each participating node's performance and makes it inconvenient for low-end devices to participate in the network. Among all contracts deployed in the blockchain, a vast majority will lead to little if any usage. We demonstrate that, in the course of one year, 70% of deployed contracts lead to no use. Unfortunately, unused contracts keep occupying space on the blockchain. To tackle this issue, we propose a new protocol to identify and delete unused contracts. Through simulation, based on Ethereum historical data, we show that deletion of smart contracts after an inactivity period of 90 days could lead to a 66% reduction in the number of contracts stored over a year.
- Published
- 2021