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SoK: Sharding on Blockchain

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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.

Notes

Wang et al. - 2019 - SoK Sharding on Blockchain, p.4

The number of committees grows proportionally to the total computation power in the network. All committees, each of which has a small constant number c of members, run a classical BFT consensus protocol internally to agree on one block.

Shortcoming. How do you pick ? Especially if you have a staked consensus system

BibTex

@inproceedings{wangSoKShardingBlockchain2019,
  author = {Wang, Gang and Shi, Zhijie Jerry and Nixon, Mark and Han, Song},
  title = {SoK: Sharding on Blockchain},
  shorttitle = {SoK},
  year = {2019},
  month = {oct},
  pages = {41--61},
  doi = {10.1145/3318041.3355457},
  publisher = {ACM},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies},
  address = {Zurich Switzerland},
  urldate = {2025-10-24},
  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.},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-6732-5},
  langid = {english}
}

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