LabX Introductions

Since the introduction of Bitcoin [4], blockchain technology and the idea of decentralization have gradually gained popularity.

Ethereum [5] and its smart contracts gave almost unlimited application for distributed ledger technology.

However, the main concerns of early blockchain technology were security and decentralization while transaction processing capacity was not considered enough. The transaction processing capacity of about a dozen TPS has greatly limited the further development of blockchain applications, considering the present scenario, with the explosive growth of decentralized applications such as DeFi, GameFi, and NFT, the number of transactions submitted to the permissionless blockchains have increased exponentially.

At peak traffic, the gas price of the Ethereum network can reach thousands of Gwei and a single transaction can cost a user a hundred of dollars in transaction fees.

The transaction processing capacity of permissionless blockchains is becoming a bottleneck for the continued growth of the decentralized economy.

In order to solve the problem of scaling in permissionless blockchain, numerous technological advancements and solutions have been proposed and applied [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13], some of which are based on multi-chain architecture and some on state sharding.

Those techniques alleviate the pressure of scaling to some extent. Still, this horizontal splitting causes fragmentation of the whole system and sacrifices some security and decentralization features and still does not solve the scaling problem. Meanwhile, there are also Layer 2-based scaling solutions, such as Rollup [15], Plasma [14], State Channels [16], etc, which made progress in scalability but were not systematic and thorough. From a functional point of view, the whole blockchain system consists of three parts:

• Execution of transactions

• Verification and consensus on the results of transaction execution

• Storage of the original data of the transaction.

The specifics of each part are different. Putting those together to optimize will inevitably lead them to conflict with each other.

Optimization can be achieved only if the entire system is vertically split in the above functions according to their specifics.

Here we propose LabX, a next-generation modular blockchain with a multi-chain architecture, that is secure, fast and scalable. We believe that LabX makes a more systematic and thorough vertical splitting of blockchain which is necessary to solve the scaling problem mentioned above fundamentally.