PolyShard: Coded Sharding Achieves Linearly Scaling Efficiency and Security Simultaneously

TL;DR

PolyShard introduces a coded sharding protocol that simultaneously achieves high efficiency, security, and scalability in blockchain systems, overcoming the traditional trilemma by leveraging polynomial coding techniques.

Contribution

The paper presents PolyShard, a novel coded sharding scheme that reaches information-theoretic bounds on storage, throughput, and trust, enabling truly scalable and secure blockchain systems.

Findings

PolyShard outperforms existing sharding methods in efficiency and security.

Simulation results demonstrate significant scalability improvements.

PolyShard achieves information-theoretic optimal bounds on system performance.

Abstract

Today's blockchain designs suffer from a trilemma claiming that no blockchain system can simultaneously achieve decentralization, security, and performance scalability. For current blockchain systems, as more nodes join the network, the efficiency of the system (computation, communication, and storage) stays constant at best. A leading idea for enabling blockchains to scale efficiency is the notion of sharding: different subsets of nodes handle different portions of the blockchain, thereby reducing the load for each individual node. However, existing sharding proposals achieve efficiency scaling by compromising on trust - corrupting the nodes in a given shard will lead to the permanent loss of the corresponding portion of data. In this paper, we settle the trilemma by demonstrating a new protocol for coded storage and computation in blockchains. In particular, we propose PolyShard: ``polynomially coded sharding'' scheme that achieves information-theoretic upper bounds on the efficiency of the storage, system throughput, as well as on trust, thus enabling a truly scalable system. We provide simulation results that numerically demonstrate the performance improvement over state of the arts, and the scalability of the PolyShard system. Finally, we discuss potential enhancements, and highlight practical considerations in building such a system.