Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology provide an innovative model for reshaping digital services. Driven by the movement toward Web 3.0, recent systems started to provide distributed services, such as computation outsourcing or file storage, on top of the currency exchange medium. By allowing anyone to join and collect cryptocurrency payments for serving others, these systems create decentralized markets for trading digital resources. Yet, there is still a big gap between the promise of these markets and their practical viability. Existing initiatives are still early-stage and have already encountered security and efficiency obstacles. At the same time, existing work around promising ideas, specifically sidechains, fall short in exploiting their full potential in addressing these problems. To bridge this gap, we propose chainBoost, a secure performance booster for decentralized resource markets. It expedites service related operations, reduces the blockchain size, and supports flexible service-payment exchange modalities at low overhead. At its core, chainBoost employs a sidechain, that has a (security and semantic) mutual-dependence with the mainchain, to which the system offloads heavy/frequent operations. To enable it, we develop a novel sidechain architecture composed of temporary and permanent blocks, a block suppression mechanism to prune the sidechain, a syncing protocol to permit arbitrary data exchange between the two chains, and an autorecovery protocol to support robustness and resilience. We analyze the security of chainBoost, and implement a proof-of-concept prototype for a distributed file storage market as a use case. For a market handling around 2000 transactions per round, our experiments show up to 11x improvement in throughput and 94\% reduction in confirmation time. They also show that chainBoost can reduce the main blockchain size by around 90%.

翻译：加密货币与区块链技术为重塑数字服务提供了创新模式。在迈向Web 3.0的浪潮推动下，近期系统开始在货币交换媒介之上提供分布式服务，例如计算外包或文件存储。通过允许任何人加入并为服务他人获取加密货币支付，这些系统创建了去中心化的数字资源交易市场。然而，这些市场的承诺与实际可行性之间仍存在巨大差距。现有方案仍处于早期阶段，且已遭遇安全性和效率障碍。同时，围绕侧链等前景广阔理念的现有研究，尚未充分发挥其在解决这些问题上的潜力。为弥合这一差距，我们提出chainBoost——一种用于去中心化资源市场的安全性能增强器。它加速了服务相关操作，缩减了区块链规模，并以低开销支持灵活的服务-支付交换模式。chainBoost的核心是采用一条与主链形成（安全与语义）相互依赖关系的侧链，系统将繁重/频繁的操作卸载至该侧链。为实现此设计，我们开发了一种由临时区块与永久区块组成的新型侧链架构、用于修剪侧链的区块抑制机制、允许双链间任意数据交换的同步协议，以及支持系统鲁棒性与弹性的自动恢复协议。我们分析了chainBoost的安全性，并以分布式文件存储市场为用例实现了概念验证原型。对于每轮处理约2000笔交易的市场，实验显示吞吐量提升最高达11倍，确认时间减少94%。实验同时表明chainBoost可将主区块链规模缩减约90%。