Scalable batch verification of ECDSA for blockchain using IVC

As blockchain transaction volumes rise,signature verification has become a critical efficiency bottleneck hindering scalability. To address this, a research team from Shandong University proposed a general approach for batch verification using memory-friendly Incremental Verifiable Computation(IVC).Their concrete instantiation,BEATS(Batch ECDSA Transaction verification Scheme),achieves significant performance gains by supporting an arbitrary number of signatures with a remarkably low memory footprint(under 1 GB).The framework allows for concurrent proof generation during signature reception,making it ideal for low-latency applications.

Digital signatures are the bedrock of blockchain security,ensuring that only authorized transactions are recorded.However,the standard ECDSA signature verification process is computationally expensive when scaled to millions of transactions.A major technical pain point in existing batch verification methods is the high memory consumption and the inability to maintain efficiency as batch sizes grow,often requiring specialized,high-performance hardware that limits decentralized participation.

The research team at Shandong University developed BEATS to bridge this gap. By leveraging IVC, the framework breaks down the verification of a large batch of signatures into small, incremental steps that can be processed recursively. This allows the system to generate proofs in parallel while still receiving data from the network, effectively hiding the computational latency.Evaluation on a standard VM shows that for a batch of 211signatures, BEATS speeds up the prover by 3-7 times and the verifier by 48-240 times compared to direct SNARK constructions like SpartanBP.

The scalability of BEATS is further highlighted by its performance on massive batches;as the batch size reaches 220, the verifier achieves a speedup of up to 174 times over the baseline16.With its peak memory usage remaining below 1 GB,BEATS ensures that even nodes with modest hardware can participate in high-throughput blockchain networks.This work provides a scalable and robust path for next-generation blockchain infrastructure.

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