SoK: Sharding on Blockchain

Gang Wang; Zhijie Jerry Shi; Mark Nixon; Song Han

Paper 2019/1178

SoK: Sharding on Blockchain

Gang Wang, Zhijie Jerry Shi, Mark Nixon, and Song Han

Abstract

Blockchain is a distributed and decentralized ledger for recording transactions. It is maintained and shared among the participating nodes by utilizing cryptographic primitives. A consensus protocol ensures that all nodes agree on a unique order in which records are appended. However, current blockchain solutions are facing scalability issues. Many methods, such as Off-chain and Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) solutions, have been proposed to address the issue. However, they have inherent drawbacks, e.g., forming parasite chains. Performance, such as throughput and latency, is also important to a blockchain system. Sharding has emerged as a good candidate that can overcome both the scalability and performance problems in blockchain. To date, there is no systematic work that analyzes the sharding protocols. To bridge this gap, this paper provides a systematic and comprehensive review on blockchain sharding techniques. We first present a general design flow of sharding protocols and then discuss key design challenges. For each challenge, we analyze and compare the techniques in state-of-the-art solutions. Finally, we discuss several potential research directions in blockchain sharding.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Foundations
Publication info: Published elsewhere. 1st ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT '19)
DOI: 10.1145/3318041.3355457
Keywords: Blockchain Sharding Scheme Consensus Protocol
Contact author(s): g wang china86 @ gmail com
History: 2019-10-10: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2019/1178
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2019/1178,
      author = {Gang Wang and Zhijie Jerry Shi and Mark Nixon and Song Han},
      title = {{SoK}: Sharding on Blockchain},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2019/1178},
      year = {2019},
      doi = {10.1145/3318041.3355457},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1178}
}