Horizontal Scaling of Transaction-Creating Machines for Blockchains

The increasing popularity of blockchains raises the question of how to improve their scalability. While researchers are exploring ways to scale the on-chain processing of transactions, the scalability of the off-chain creation of transactions has not been investigated yet. This is relevant for organizations wishing to send a high volume of transactions in a short time frame, or continuously. Especially for blockchain implementations such as Ethereum which require transactions to include so-called nonces, horizontally scaling transaction creation is non-trivial. In this paper, we propose four different approaches for horizontal scaling of transaction creation in Ethereum. Our experimental evaluation examines the performance of the different approaches in terms of scalability and latency and finds two of the four proposed approaches feasible to scale transaction creation horizontally.