Resonance: Transaction Fees for Heterogeneous Computation

Blockchain networks are facing increasingly heterogeneous computational demands, and in response, protocol designers have started building specialized infrastructure to supply that demand. This paper introduces Resoonance: a new kind of transaction fee mechanism that operates in a general two-sided marketplace setting with extreme preference heterogeneity on both sides of the market. We allow users submitting transactions to have arbitrary valuations for inclusion, nodes responsible for executing transactions to incur arbitrary net costs for executing any bundle, and further allow for arbitrary constraints in allocation validity. These constraints, for example, may range from representing an individual node's specialized hardware constraints to denoting the fact that transactions may not be executed in parallel across different nodes if they utilize the same part of the network's state. Transactions may even require multiple nodes for execution. Resonance's design utilizes competition among sophisticated brokers to find idiosyncratic prices. We show that at pure Nash equilibria, Resonance finds an efficient outcome and minimizes the need for strategization by users and nodes. It is also budget-balanced, individually rational for all parties, and computationally tractable.