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RapidChain: Scaling Blockchain via Full Sharding

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Abstract

A major approach to overcoming the performance and scalability limitations of current blockchain protocols is to use sharding which is to split the overheads of processing transactions among multiple, smaller groups of nodes. These groups work in parallel to maximize performance while requiring significantly smaller communication, computation, and storage per node, allowing the system to scale to large networks. However, existing sharding-based blockchain protocols still require a linear amount of communication (in the number of participants) per transaction, and hence, attain only partially the potential benefits of sharding. We show that this introduces a major bottleneck to the throughput and latency of these protocols. Aside from the limited scalability, these protocols achieve weak security guarantees due to either a small fault resiliency (e.g., 1/8 and 1/4) or high failure probability, or they rely on strong assumptions (e.g., trusted setup) that limit their applicability to mainstream payment systems.

BibTex

@inproceedings{zamaniRapidChainScalingBlockchain2018,
  author = {Zamani, Mahdi and Movahedi, Mahnush and Raykova, Mariana},
  title = {RapidChain: Scaling Blockchain via Full Sharding},
  shorttitle = {RapidChain},
  year = {2018},
  month = {oct},
  pages = {931--948},
  doi = {10.1145/3243734.3243853},
  publisher = {ACM},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security},
  address = {Toronto Canada},
  urldate = {2025-10-24},
  abstract = {A major approach to overcoming the performance and scalability limitations of current blockchain protocols is to use sharding which is to split the overheads of processing transactions among multiple, smaller groups of nodes. These groups work in parallel to maximize performance while requiring significantly smaller communication, computation, and storage per node, allowing the system to scale to large networks. However, existing sharding-based blockchain protocols still require a linear amount of communication (in the number of participants) per transaction, and hence, attain only partially the potential benefits of sharding. We show that this introduces a major bottleneck to the throughput and latency of these protocols. Aside from the limited scalability, these protocols achieve weak security guarantees due to either a small fault resiliency (e.g., 1/8 and 1/4) or high failure probability, or they rely on strong assumptions (e.g., trusted setup) that limit their applicability to mainstream payment systems.},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-5693-0},
  langid = {english}
}

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