TY - GEN
T1 - Reducing Gas Consumption of Tornado Cash and Other Smart Contracts in Ethereum
AU - Yang, Jingyan
AU - Gao, Shang
AU - Li, Guyue
AU - Song, Rui
AU - Xiao, Bin
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 IEEE.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Ethereum, the largest blockchain for running smart contracts, has been widely used, especially in financial and cryptocurrency exchange applications. Among them, Tornado Cash is a typical financial application that protects the privacy of users with anonymous transactions. However, users need to pay prohibitively high gas (transaction fees for smart contract calls) for anonymous transactions, which hinders Tornado Cash from wide applications. To address this issue, we introduced a new approach that shifts the high gas-consuming operations on smart contracts to local users. Furthermore, we use zero-knowledge proofs to ensure the operations are properly executed. The smart contract only needs to verify and update the results, which significantly reduces the gas fees of Tornado Cash. To validate our approach, we implemented a prototype and showed that our proposed method could save more than 61% of gas consumption of current operations while maintaining the privacy feature of Tornado Cash. Finally, we discussed further applications and open problems of our approach.
AB - Ethereum, the largest blockchain for running smart contracts, has been widely used, especially in financial and cryptocurrency exchange applications. Among them, Tornado Cash is a typical financial application that protects the privacy of users with anonymous transactions. However, users need to pay prohibitively high gas (transaction fees for smart contract calls) for anonymous transactions, which hinders Tornado Cash from wide applications. To address this issue, we introduced a new approach that shifts the high gas-consuming operations on smart contracts to local users. Furthermore, we use zero-knowledge proofs to ensure the operations are properly executed. The smart contract only needs to verify and update the results, which significantly reduces the gas fees of Tornado Cash. To validate our approach, we implemented a prototype and showed that our proposed method could save more than 61% of gas consumption of current operations while maintaining the privacy feature of Tornado Cash. Finally, we discussed further applications and open problems of our approach.
KW - Ethereum
KW - gas
KW - privacy protection
KW - smart contract
KW - zk-SNARK
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85151676627
U2 - 10.1109/TrustCom56396.2022.00127
DO - 10.1109/TrustCom56396.2022.00127
M3 - Conference article published in proceeding or book
AN - SCOPUS:85151676627
T3 - Proceedings - 2022 IEEE 21st International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2022
SP - 921
EP - 926
BT - Proceedings - 2022 IEEE 21st International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2022
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 21st IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2022
Y2 - 9 December 2022 through 11 December 2022
ER -