RaceTEE: enabling interoperability of confidential smart contracts

Conference item

Decentralized smart contracts enable trustless collaboration but suffer from limited privacy and scalability, which hinders broader adoption. Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) based off-chain execution frameworks offer a promising solution to both issues. Although TEE-based frameworks have made significant progress, prior work has yet to fully explore contract interoperability, a critical foundation for building complex realworld decentralized applications. This paper identifies the key challenges impeding such interoperability and presents practical solutions. Based on these insights, we introduce RaceTEE, a novel framework that leverages off-chain TEE-enabled nodes to efficiently execute confidential, long-lived smart contracts with interactions of arbitrary complexity among contracts. We implement a RaceTEE prototype using Intel SGX, integrate it with Ethereum, and release it as open source. Evaluation across diverse use cases demonstrates its practicality and effectiveness.

Authors: Zhang, K; Martin, A

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: IEEE
• Host title: 2025 IEEE 24th International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom)
• Pages: 62-73
• Publication date: 2026-02-02
• Acceptance date: 2025-10-04
• Event title: 24th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom-2025)
• Event location: Guiyang, China
• Event website: https://ieee-aiplus-2025.org/
• Event start date: 2025-11-14
• Event end date: 2025-11-17
• DOI: 10.1109/Trustcom66490.2025.00016
• EISSN: 2324-9013
• ISSN: 2324-898X
• EISBN: 9798331565329
• ISBN: 9798331565336
• Language: English
• Keywords: confidential smart contracts; contract interoperability; off-chain execution; trusted execution environments