ServiceChain: A Verifiable Cloud Service Framework for Resource-Constrained Blockchain Nodes

Resource-constrained blockchain nodes, such as IoT devices and lightweight edge devices, often cannot afford the computation, storage, and communication overhead required by full blockchain maintenance. Offloading these tasks to cloud service providers can reduce local resource consumption, but it also introduces new trust concerns, including incorrect service execution, unverifiable storage, and single-point dependence on centralized providers. This paper presents ServiceChain, a permissioned blockchain-based framework for verifiable cloud services. Rather than treating blockchain, IPFS, or BFT consensus as standalone components, ServiceChain couples outsourced service execution with on-chain verification through a unified Service Task and Service Transaction abstraction. Each Service Transaction binds the service input, output, provider signature, task-specific verification logic, and Credit Token transfer, so that only correctly executed services can be recorded and rewarded. ServiceChain further incorporates a Credit Token-driven reputation mechanism into the leader election process of a HotStuff-style BFT consensus protocol, allowing recently active and verifiably honest service providers to obtain higher leadership priority while reducing repeated leader dominance through a sliding-window penalty. We implement a Golang prototype of ServiceChain and evaluate its throughput, block latency, and client-side resource savings. Experimental results show that ServiceChain achieves up to 8671 TPS in a 4-node setting and 4911 TPS in a 16-node setting with 4 MB blocks, while reducing the CPU usage of lightweight clients from 11.1% to about 1% when computation-intensive tasks are offloaded.