Towards Scaling Blockchain Systems via Sharding

Existing blockchain systems scale poorly because of their distributed consensus protocols. Current attempts at improving blockchain scalability are limited to cryptocurrency. Scaling blockchain systems under general workloads (i.e., non-cryptocurrency applications) remains an open question. This work takes a principled approach to apply sharding to blockchain systems in order to improve their transaction throughput at scale. This is challenging, however, due to the fundamental difference in failure models between databases and blockchain. To achieve our goal, we first enhance the performance of Byzantine consensus protocols, improving individual shards' throughput. Next, we design an efficient shard formation…

• NR
  National Research Foundation Singapore
• MO
  Ministry of Education - Singapore

  Award: MOE2017-T3-1-007