Kaizen: Building a Performant Blockchain System Verified for Consensus and Integrity Faria Kalim∗, Karl Palmskogy, Jayasi Meharz, Adithya Murali∗, Indranil Gupta∗ and P. Madhusudan∗ ∗University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign yThe University of Texas at Austin zFacebook ∗fkalim2, adithya5, indy,
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract—We report on the development of a blockchain for it [7]. This protocol can then be automatically translated to system that is significantly verified and performant, detailing equivalent code in a functional language and deployed using the design, proof, and system development based on a process of a shim layer to a network to obtain working reference imple- continuous refinement. We instantiate this framework to build, to the best of our knowledge, the first blockchain (Kaizen) that is mentations of the basic protocol. However, there are several performant and verified to a large degree, and a cryptocurrency drawbacks to this—it is extremely hard to work further on protocol (KznCoin) over it. We experimentally compare its the reference implementation to refine it to correct imperative performance against the stock Bitcoin implementation. and performant code, and to add more features to it to meet practical requirements for building applications. I. INTRODUCTION The second technique, pioneered by the IronFleet sys- Blockchains are used to build a variety of distributed sys- tems [8], is to use a system such as Dafny to prove a system tems, e.g., applications such as cryptocurrency (Bitcoin [1] and correct with respect to its specification via automated theorem altcoins [2]), banking, finance, automobiles, health, supply- proving (using SMT solvers) guided by manual annotations.