Yinan & Juncheng ICDE Practice Talk

We’ll have Yinan & Juncheng present their ICDE works for this week’s ISG Seminar. This will be a shared session.

Time & Location:

Friday May 1, 2026, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Donald Bren Hall 3011, ICS, UC Irvine

Zoom:

https://uci.zoom.us/j/95509222811?pwd=2V8Hnx71iP6dyfNsEPoo97NUfCFWTo.1

Lunch will be provided.

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Speaker

Yinan Zhou

Title

SpendableStore: A UTXO-based Decentralized Data Store

Abstract

The literature on blockchain-based databases is divided into permissioned blockchains and permissionless account based blockchains. However, the former is not fully decentralized, and the latter suffers from challenges in scalability and practicality. We propose SpendableStore, a hybrid on/off-chain database that operates on top of permissionless UTXO-based blockchains as a novel approach to the problem of data decentralization. Our design integrates atomic data units into individual UTXOs to create a new blockchain concept called Spendable Data Objects that perform traditional CRUD operations. The integrity, immutability, and ownership of these Spendable Data Objects are safeguarded directly by the blockchain peer nodes, thus constraining the power of database administrators to achieve true data decentralization. We further support database transactions and propose an isolation mechanism called Future Now Snapshot Isolation to reason about transactional correctness in SpendableStore. We performed experiments on a major blockchain’s Mainnet and observed up to 16x better throughput compared to a state-of-the-art blockchain-based database.

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Speaker

Juncheng Fang

Title

ImmortalChopper: Real-Time and Resilient Distributed Transactions in the Edge-Cloud

Abstract

Emerging applications in the areas of real-time Internet of Things (IoT) and edge technologies require fast processing and response times. This motivates the utilization of edge nodes for storing and processing data close to the user. In settings with a vast number of edge nodes, the state of the data is distributed across a large number of edge nodes. This makes it expensive to perform distributed transactions as these transactions would span edge nodes that are connected via less reliable and relatively slow network infrastructure. It is prohibitive to use existing protocols like 2PC that require many rounds of communication across participants.
In this talk, we discuss ImmortalChopper, a distributed transaction processing protocol designed for the edge-cloud environment. The goal of ImmortalChopper is to provide One-Node Response (1n-Response), a guarantee of transaction commitment by contacting only one node without waiting for coordination with the other nodes. To achieve this, we build on and extend the literature of transaction chopping and lazy replication. However, combining transaction chopping and lazy replication without special care can lead to transactions operating on a stale state and potentially violating serializability. We present a new transaction chopping theory called ChopperGraph that integrates the notion of lazy replication and speculative execution. It ensures 1n-Response while preserving serializability.

Bio

Juncheng Fang is a 5th-year Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science Department at UC Irvine, supervised by Prof. Faisal Nawab. His current research focuses on distributed transaction processing, specifically improving the concurrency by exploiting the semantics of transactions.

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