Prism Removes Consensus Bottleneck for Smart Contracts

The performance of existing permissionless smart contract platforms such as Ethereum is limited by the consensus layer. Prism [1] is a new proof-of-work consensus protocol that provably achieves throughput and latency up to physical limits while retaining the strong security guarantees of the longest chain protocol. This paper reports experimental results from implementations of two smart contract virtual machines, EVM and MoveVM, on top of Prism and demonstrates that the consensus bottleneck has been removed.