TimeFabric: Trusted time for permissioned blockchains

Abstract

As the popularity of blockchains continues to rise, blockchain platforms must be enhanced to support new application needs. In this paper, we propose one such enhancement that is essential for financial applications and online marketplaces - support for time-based logic such as verifying deadlines or expiry dates and examining a time window of recent account activity. We present a lightweight solution to reach consensus on the current time without relying on external time oracles. Our solution assigns timestamps to blocks at transaction validation time and maintains a cache reflecting the effects of recent transactions. We implement a proof-of-concept prototype, called TimeFabric, in Hyperledger Fabric, a popular permissioned blockchain platform, and experimentally demonstrate high throughput and minimal overhead (approximately 3%) of maintaining trusted time. We also demonstrate a 2x performance improvement due to the cache, compared to reconstructing account histories from the ledger.