Papers › Highly Available Blockchain Nodes With N-Version Design
Highly Available Blockchain Nodes With N-Version Design
Javier Ron, César Soto-Valero, Long Zhang, Benoit Baudry, Martin Monperrus
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
As all software, blockchain nodes are exposed to faults in their underlying execution stack. Unstable execution environments can disrupt the availability of blockchain nodes interfaces, resulting in downtime for users. This paper introduces the concept of N-version Blockchain nodes. This new type of node relies on simultaneous execution of different implementations of the same blockchain protocol, in the line of Avizienis' N-version programming vision. We design and implement an N-version blockchain node prototype in the context of Ethereum, called N-ETH. We show that N-ETH is able to mitigate the effects of unstable execution environments and significantly enhance availability under environment faults. To simulate unstable execution environments, we perform fault injection at the system-call level. Our results show that existing Ethereum node implementations behave asymmetrically under identical instability scenarios. N-ETH leverages this asymmetric behavior available in the diverse implementations of Ethereum nodes to provide increased availability, even under our most aggressive fault-injection strategies. We are the first to validate the relevance of N-version design in the domain of blockchain infrastructure. From an industrial perspective, our results are of utmost importance for businesses operating blockchain nodes, including Google, ConsenSys, and many other major blockchain companies.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections