Introducing Stateless Smart Contracts: A Game-Changer for Blockchain Scalability

Introduction

Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize industries and change the way we interact with digital assets. However, as the popularity of blockchain applications grows, so does the issue of scalability. The current state of the art in blockchain scalability relies on sharding, which involves breaking the blockchain into smaller pieces and spreading the load across multiple nodes. While this is a step in the right direction, it is still a relatively new technology and has its own set of issues.

In this article, we'll introduce a new concept that could potentially solve the scalability problem once and for all: stateless smart contracts.

What are Stateless Smart Contracts?

The stateless smart contract is a design concept used to significantly reduce the gas cost of Ethereum smart contracts.

A traditional smart contract, also known as a stateful contract, is a program that maintains a permanent state on the blockchain. This state is updated and stored in the contract's storage and can be accessed by other contracts. A stateless smart contract, on the other hand, is a program that does not maintain any state on the blockchain. Instead, it retrieves the necessary information from an off-chain source and uses it to execute its operations.

Advantages of Stateless Smart Contracts:

Reduced storage costs: One of the biggest advantages of stateless smart contracts is that they significantly reduce the amount of storage required on the blockchain. Since stateless contracts don't maintain any state, they don't need to store any data on the blockchain. This greatly reduces the storage costs for both the contract owner and the users interacting with the contract.

Increased scalability: Stateless smart contracts can also greatly increase the scalability of blockchain applications. Without the need to store data on the blockchain, the network is less bogged down by large amounts of data. This can greatly increase the number of transactions that can be processed per second, allowing for more users and more use cases.

Improved security: Another advantage of stateless smart contracts is that they can improve the overall security of blockchain applications. Since stateless contracts don't maintain any state on the blockchain, they can't be targeted by hackers who might be looking to exploit any vulnerabilities in a contract's storage.

Let's see an example:

pragma solidity ^0.7.0;

contract SimpleFileStore {

address public ipfs;

mapping(bytes32 => address) public ownerOf;

constructor(address _ipfs) {

ipfs = _ipfs;

}

function save(bytes32 hash, string memory data) public {

ownerOf[hash] = msg.sender;

IPFSApi(_ipfs).store(hash, data);

}

function retrieve(bytes32 hash) public view returns (string memory){

require(ownerOf[hash] == msg.sender, "You are not the owner of this file.");

return IPFSApi(_ipfs).retrieve(hash);

}

}

This smart contract defines a SimpleFileStore contract, it uses an IPFS contract to handle the storing and retrieval of data, this contract takes the address of the IPFS contract as input in the constructor function, it has two public fields, ipfs and ownerOf . The contract also defines two functions save and retrieve, save function takes hash and data as inputs and stores the ownership of file hash to msg.sender and it calls the store() function from the IPFS contract passing hash and data as inputs. The retrieve function takes a bytes32 hash as input, it checks if the msg.sender is the owner of that hash, if yes it calls the retrieve() function from the IPFS contract passing hash as input which returns the data stored under that hash.

This contract uses a separate contract for IPFS calls which is called IPFSApi, it should be already deployed and has the same interface as IPFS, it only stores the ownership of each file hash and uses the IPFS contract to handle the actual storage and retrieval of the data. This can help reduce the storage cost on the blockchain and also enables the data to be stored in a distributed network, increasing its availability and fault tolerance.

Conclusion:

Stateless smart contracts are a relatively new concept in the world of blockchain, but they have the potential to greatly improve the scalability and security of blockchain applications. By reducing storage costs and increasing scalability, stateless smart contracts can help to pave the way for mass adoption of blockchain technology. While it's still a new area and more research is needed, Stateless smart contracts are a promising solution to the scalability issues faced by blockchain.