Blockchain technology enhances transparency by maintaining a distributed ledger among mutually untrusting parties. Despite its advantages, scalability and availability remain critical bottlenecks that hinder widespread adoption. The increasing complexity of blockchain nodes further necessitates robust fault tolerance and high throughput to ensure seamless operations. We present BlockRaFT, a crash-tolerant distributed framework designed to improve both the scalability and reliability of blockchain node operations. BlockRaFT framework utilizes RAFT consensus protocol to elect a leader within a cluster of systems. The elected leader coordinates and distributes workloads across follower nodes, thereby optimizing resource utilization and work load balancing. We analyzed the tasks performed by blockchain nodes and partition them according to their stateful and stateless characteristics. Stateless operations are centralized at the leader, while stateful operations are replicated and coordinated across the cluster to ensure consistency and fault tolerance. We evaluate whether this distributed intra-node architecture provides measurable benefits over traditional single-node execution models in terms of scalability, availability, and performance. Additionally, we introduce a concurrent Merkle tree optimization that decouples smart contract execution from tree updates, significantly reducing one of the significant performance overheads in blockchain systems. Our design philosophy is rooted in utilizing the well-established principles of distributed computing and customizing them for the blockchain domain rather than reinventing them.

翻译：区块链技术通过在互不信任的各方之间维护分布式账本来增强透明度。尽管具有诸多优势，可扩展性和可用性仍是阻碍其广泛普及的关键瓶颈。日益复杂的区块链节点进一步要求具备强大的容错能力和高吞吐量，以确保系统平稳运行。本文提出BlockRaFT——一种面向崩溃容错的分布式框架，旨在提升区块链节点操作的可扩展性与可靠性。该框架利用RAFT共识协议在系统集群中选举领导者，被选举的领导者协调并分配工作负载至从节点，从而优化资源利用和负载均衡。我们分析了区块链节点执行的任务，并根据其有状态与无状态特性进行划分。无状态操作集中由领导者处理，而有状态操作则在集群中复制并协同执行，以确保一致性和容错性。我们评估了这种分布式节点内架构相较于传统单节点执行模型在可扩展性、可用性和性能方面是否具有可量化的优势。此外，我们引入了一种并发Merkle树优化技术，将智能合约执行与树更新解耦，显著降低了区块链系统中的一项主要性能开销。我们的设计理念根植于利用分布式计算领域的成熟原理，并针对区块链领域进行定制化改造，而非重新发明这些原理。