journal article·2026-01-03Open access

Storage Replica: Accelerating the Storage Access of the Ethereum Virtual Machine

Kamil Jezek, Seongho Jeong, Yeonsoo Kim, Bernhard Scholz, Bernd Burgstaller

Applied Sciences· Volume 16· Issue 1

Abstract

Ethereum’s smart contracts operate on directly addressable storage that is represented as tries. The performance of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) suffers from slow storage access due to trie encoding, which hampers transaction throughput and scalability. To mitigate the Ethereum storage performance bottleneck, we propose a new storage representation for the EVM that supports asynchronous trie construction. Without changing the Ethereum protocol, we add a flat representation called Storage Replica to improve performance. Storage Replica provides a fast lookup of values in the program’s main thread, while a worker thread prepares the tries for subsequent cryptographic calculations. With a storage overhead of less than 5% (i.e., 10 GB), we achieve up to a 6× speedup in processing smart contracts and a 4× speedup in block commits for the initial 9 M blocks of the Ethereum blockchain.
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Research context

OpenAlex topics: Blockchain Technology Applications and Security · Security and Verification in Computing · Cryptography and Data Security

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia

Sonic Labs, 4th Floor, Cayman Financial Center, 36A Dr. Roy’s Drive, P.O. Box 2510, Grand Cayman KY1-1104, Cayman Islands

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul 03722, Republic of Korea

Funding

Sonic Labs and under its former name Fantom Foundation · Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) funded by the Korean government · Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education

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