ORIC: A Self-Adjusting Blockchain Protocol with High Throughput

This paper presents a simple and self-adjusting blockchain protocol called ORIC to make full use of the available bandwidth as far as possible. ORIC follows the Nakamoto protocol and allows many more blocks to be produced during the block-time so that the bandwidth can be exploited to its maximum extent. Recorded blocks are organized into a Directed Acyclic Graph(DAG) sequence from which a transaction total order can be deterministically derived as the blockchain ledger. We give a theoretical analysis of ORIC’s properties, such as security and liveness, and evaluate its performance on a distributed system simulator with 1000 full nodes designed. The simulation shows that ORIC can achieve bandwidth utilization close to 50% while confirming transactions in 5-7 minutes under the bandwidth of 20Mbps available. More importantly, our protocol can achieve an optimal throughput by a self-adjusting mechanism when the available bandwidth changes in a peer-to-peer network while hardly affecting security.