BLOCKCHAIN SHARDING


EOI: 10.11242/viva-tech.01.04.181

Download Full Text here



Citation

Sreeraj Menon,Prof.ChandaniPatel, "BLOCKCHAIN SHARDING", VIVA-IJRI Volume 1, Issue 4, Article 181, pp. 1-6, 2021. Published by Computer Engineering Department, VIVA Institute of Technology, Virar, India.

Abstract

Bitcoin has been a hot topic in the technology industry since its boom in 2017. The underlying technology of bitcoin is the blockchain that has impressed many of the onlookers due to its transparency and usability in this globalized world. In cryptocurrencies, a ledger is operated which contains all the data regarding the transactions and contracts that are to be executed. These ledgers are maintained on multiple nodes around the world. Every node has to maintain a full copy of the ledger which currently is 15 GB for bitcoin. As more and more transactions are carried on the blockchain, this approach becomes slow. Scaling is the only solution to counter this problem, that's where the sharding technology comes into play. In sharding, rather than each node maintaining the full ledger, the ledger is divided or sharded into multiple fragments. So, in short, each node consists of a small part of the ledger rather than the whole ledger which is easy to maintain and in turn helps in scaling the blockchain. So rather than a full blockchain, we have shard chains that consist of multiple node or validator networks which are then assigned multiple tasks like verifying transactions or operations.

Keywords

Blockchain, Consensus, Hashing, Ledger, Sharding

References

  1. Castro, M., Liskov, B., et al. Practical byzantine fault tolerance. In OSDI (1999), vol. 99, pp. 173–186.
  2. Popov, S. The tangle. cit. on (2016), 131.
  3. Luu, L., Narayanan, V., Zheng, C., Baweja, K., Gilbert, S., and Saxena, P. A secure sharding protocol for open blockchains. In proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (2016), ACM, pp. 17–30.
  4. Satoshi Nakamoto. 2008. Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system.
  5. Vitalik Buterin. 2014. Ethereum: A next-generation smart contract and decentralized application platform. https://github.com/ ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper (2014).
  6. Bitcoin Wiki. 2018. Scalability. en.bitcoin.it/wiki/scalability
  7. Ripple. https://ripple.com
  8. Fr8 Network. 2018. Blockchain enabled logistic. https://fr8.network.
  9. Miguel Correia, Essentials of Blockchain Technology (CRC Press, 2019).
  10. Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin (O’Reilly Media, Inc.,2014)
  11. Kokoris-Kogias, E., Jovanovic, P., Gasser, L., Gailly, N., Syta, E., and Ford, B. Omniledger: A secure, scale-out, decentralized ledger via sharding. In 2018 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) (2018), IEEE, pp. 583–598.
  12. Wang, J., and Wang, H. Monoxide: Scale out blockchains with asynchronous consensus zones. In 16th {USENIX} Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation ({NSDI} 19) (2019), pp. 95–112.
  13. Alex Skidanov, Nightshade:Near Protocol Sharding Design (2019).
  14. Bob Gregory, Technology of Atomic Swaps (2015).
  15. Medjitena Nadir, A practical guide to blockchain business (2018).