Aplos: Smart Contracts Made Smart

Abstract

Smart contract is a programming interface to interact with the underlying blockchain storage models. It is a database abstraction layer for blockchain. Existing smart contract platforms follow the imperative style programming model since states are shared. As a result, there is no concurrency control mechanism when executing transactions, resulting in considerable latency and hindering scalability. To address performance and scalability issues of existing smart contract platforms, we design a new smart contract platform called “Aplos” based on the Scala functional programming language and Akka actors. In Aplos, all blockchain-related smart contract functions are implemented with Akka actors. The Aplos platform is built over Mystiko—a highly scalable blockchain storage for big data. Mystiko supports concurrent transactions, high transaction throughput, data analytics and machine learning. With Aplos smart contracts over Mystiko, we have developed a blockchain for highly scalable storage that aligns with big data requirements.