Storage Replica: Accelerating the Storage Access of the Ethereum Virtual Machine

Jezek, Kamil; Jeong, Seongho; Kim, Yeonsoo; Scholz, Bernhard; Burgstaller, Bernd

doi:10.3390/app16010486

Open AccessArticle

Storage Replica: Accelerating the Storage Access of the Ethereum Virtual Machine

by

Kamil Jezek

^1,2,†,

Seongho Jeong

^3,†

,

Yeonsoo Kim

³

,

Bernhard Scholz

^1,2

and

Bernd Burgstaller

^3,*

¹

School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia

²

Sonic Labs, 4th Floor, Cayman Financial Center, 36A Dr. Roy’s Drive, P.O. Box 2510, Grand Cayman KY1-1104, Cayman Islands

³

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul 03722, Republic of Korea

^*

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

^†

These authors contributed equally to this work.

Appl. Sci. 2026, 16(1), 486; https://doi.org/10.3390/app16010486

Submission received: 15 November 2025 / Revised: 23 December 2025 / Accepted: 27 December 2025 / Published: 3 January 2026

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Blockchain Technology and Its Applications)

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Abstract

Ethereum’s smart contracts operate on directly addressable storage that is represented as tries. The performance of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) suffers from slow storage access due to trie encoding, which hampers transaction throughput and scalability. To mitigate the Ethereum storage performance bottleneck, we propose a new storage representation for the EVM that supports asynchronous trie construction. Without changing the Ethereum protocol, we add a flat representation called Storage Replica to improve performance. Storage Replica provides a fast lookup of values in the program’s main thread, while a worker thread prepares the tries for subsequent cryptographic calculations. With a storage overhead of less than 5% (i.e., 10

GB

), we achieve up to a 6× speedup in processing smart contracts and a 4× speedup in block commits for the initial 9 M blocks of the Ethereum blockchain.

Keywords: Ethereum Virtual Machine; smart contract; Merkle Patricia trie; asynchronous trie construction; state trie bottleneck

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MDPI and ACS Style

Jezek, K.; Jeong, S.; Kim, Y.; Scholz, B.; Burgstaller, B. Storage Replica: Accelerating the Storage Access of the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Appl. Sci. 2026, 16, 486. https://doi.org/10.3390/app16010486

AMA Style

Jezek K, Jeong S, Kim Y, Scholz B, Burgstaller B. Storage Replica: Accelerating the Storage Access of the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Applied Sciences. 2026; 16(1):486. https://doi.org/10.3390/app16010486

Chicago/Turabian Style

Jezek, Kamil, Seongho Jeong, Yeonsoo Kim, Bernhard Scholz, and Bernd Burgstaller. 2026. "Storage Replica: Accelerating the Storage Access of the Ethereum Virtual Machine" Applied Sciences 16, no. 1: 486. https://doi.org/10.3390/app16010486

APA Style

Jezek, K., Jeong, S., Kim, Y., Scholz, B., & Burgstaller, B. (2026). Storage Replica: Accelerating the Storage Access of the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Applied Sciences, 16(1), 486. https://doi.org/10.3390/app16010486

Note that from the first issue of 2016, this journal uses article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.

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Storage Replica: Accelerating the Storage Access of the Ethereum Virtual Machine

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