FLOCK: Fast, Lightweight, and Scalable Allocation for Decentralized Services on Blockchain

Abstract

Many decentralised services have recently emerged on top of blockchain, offering benefits like privacy, and allowing any node in the network to share its resources. In order to be a competitive alternative to their central counterparts, their performance needs to match up. Specifically, service allocation remains a performance bottleneck for many decentralised services.In this paper we present FLOCK, an allocation system which is highly scalable, fast, and lightweight. Furthermore, it allows nodes to indicate their preference for clients/sellers without needing to submit bids by using stable matching algorithms. We decouple the price discovery and outsource this function to a smart contract on the blockchain.Additionally, another smart contract is used to orchestrate the allocation and take care of service discovery, while trusted execution environments securely compute allocation solutions, and off-chain payment networks are used to send rewards.Evaluation of FLOCK shows that gas costs are manageable and improve upon other solutions which leverage auctions, and that our instance of the stable matching algorithm greatly improves run-time and throughput over auction counterparts. Finally, our discussion outlines practical improvements to further increase performance.

Decentralization and web3 technologies

“…Gringotts [69] provides a "Proof of Delivery" mechanism to incentivize the distribution of content across the network. FLOCK [70] is an allocation framework for jobs on a network of diverse applications (like a smart contract blockchain). It allows parties to state which jobs they prefer to process in the hopes of increasing satisfaction of participating in the network.…”