Parallel Sequencing and Execution

A core innovation that underpins Zenith Network's high performance is the decoupling of transaction sequencing (ordering) from transaction execution. This parallelization allows ZTH to achieve significantly faster block production and overall throughput compared to traditional blockchain architectures.

• Optimizing Block Production and Transaction Execution:

  • In most blockchains, transactions are executed sequentially within each block, and the resulting state changes are reflected in the next block. This creates a bottleneck, as block production cannot proceed until all transactions in the current block have been executed.

  • ZTH breaks this dependency by separating the concerns of ordering transactions and executing them.

  • Block production in ZTH involves simply collating semantically correct transactions in a deterministic order and committing to the Merkle root of the state from the previous block (N-1), not the current one (N).

  • This allows new blocks to be produced very rapidly, as they only need to contain a list of ordered transactions and a commitment to the previous state.

  • The actual execution of transactions and the calculation of the new state root can happen in parallel with block production.

• Self-Healing Mechanism: Adaptive Block Times and Capacity:

  • While parallelization offers significant performance gains, it also introduces the possibility that transaction execution might fall behind block production, particularly if the transaction load is unexpectedly high.

  • To address this, ZTH incorporates a self-healing mechanism that dynamically adjusts block production times and capacity based on the execution status.

  • If the execution of transactions in block N-1 is not completed by the time block N's production deadline arrives, the deadline for block N+1 is exponentially increased. This gives the execution process more time to catch up.

  • Simultaneously, the transaction capacity of new blocks is reduced, limiting the number of new transactions that need to be executed and further alleviating the load on the execution process.

  • This adaptive mechanism ensures that the network remains stable and responsive even under heavy load, preventing execution from falling permanently behind.

• Mitigation of Selfish MEV:

  • The extremely tight block production deadlines in ZTH make it significantly harder for malicious actors to engage in selfish Miner Extractable Value (MEV) strategies.

  • Selfish MEV typically involves withholding blocks or manipulating transaction order to extract profit, which is much more difficult when blocks are produced very rapidly and the time window for manipulation is extremely narrow.

  • If node operators consistently achieve the necessary speedups to capture MEV reliably, it indicates that block production deadlines can be further reduced, further enhancing the network's security and efficiency.