Overview

Blockene is a new blockchain architecture that reduces resource usage at member nodes by orders of magnitude, requiring only a smartphone to participate in block validation and consensus. Despite being lightweight, Blockene provides high throughput and scales to millions of participants. Blockene consumes negligible battery and data in smartphones, enabling millions of users to participate in the blockchain without incentives, to secure transactions with their collective honesty. Blockene achieves these properties with a novel split-trust design based on delegating storage and gossip to untrusted nodes.

Blockene provides a throughput of more than 1,000 transactions per second, and can run with very low resource usage on smartphones, pointing to a new paradigm for building trustworthy, decentralized applications.

Motivation

Existing blockchain systems require substantial hardware and network resources, excluding the vast majority of the world's population from meaningful participation. This centralization of validation power undermines the core promise of decentralized trust. The goal was to design a blockchain architecture that is scalable to millions of participants yet can run in resource-constrained settings—specifically mobile devices—so that collective honesty, rather than expensive mining, secures the network.

Architecture

Blockene achieves its properties through a novel split-trust design: storage and gossip are delegated to untrusted nodes, while validation and consensus remain with lightweight member nodes (smartphones). This separation allows member nodes to participate without bearing the full overhead of a traditional blockchain peer.

• Split-trust model: Untrusted nodes handle heavy-lifting (storage, propagation); member nodes handle validation and consensus
• Smartphone-native: Consumes negligible battery and cellular data, enabling millions of users to participate without incentives
• High throughput: Provides more than 1,000 transactions per second
• Massive scale: Designed to support millions of concurrent participants

Vishrambh: Bringing Trust in Philanthropy using Blockene

Philanthropy is a huge sector worldwide and a rapidly growing one in India. The sector globally suffers from problems such as lack of transparency, lack of trust between donors and non-profits, and corruption. With Vishrambh, we leveraged Blockene along with other technologies to design a trusted framework that enables philanthropic donations to be as accountable and transparent as direct charity—making every step from donor intent to final beneficiary impact verifiable and tamper-proof.

Awards

• First Place, Angel Hack Bangalore Chapter (2017)
• Third Place, Microsoft Global //OneWeek Hackathon — Innovative Projects for Public Sector (2018)
• First Place, Leadership Challenge by Anant Maheshwari, Anil Bhansali, Sriram Rajamani — Hackathon ideas using IndiaStack (2018)
• First Place, Leadership Challenge by Amir Sircar — Hackathon ideas using Blockchain (2018)

Key Results

• Throughput: 1,000+ transactions per second
• Resource usage: Orders of magnitude lower than conventional blockchains; negligible battery and data consumption on smartphones
• Scale: Architecture validated for millions of participants
• Paradigm shift: Points to a new model for building trustworthy, decentralized applications where collective honesty—not expensive incentives—secures the network