Building Blocks of Sharding Blockchain Systems: Concepts, Approaches, and Open Problems
Yizhong Liu, Jianwei Liu, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles, Zongyang Zhang,, Tong Li, Bin Hu, Fritz Henglein, Rongxing Lu

TL;DR
This paper systematically analyzes sharding blockchain systems, decomposing their architecture into functional components, reviewing approaches, identifying open problems, and proposing future research directions to enhance security and performance.
Contribution
It provides a modular architectural framework for sharding blockchains, systematically reviews existing approaches, and highlights open problems and future research directions.
Findings
Identified key functional components of sharding blockchains.
Reviewed existing approaches and their limitations.
Outlined open problems and security/performance challenges.
Abstract
Sharding is the prevalent approach to breaking the trilemma of simultaneously achieving decentralization, security, and scalability in traditional blockchain systems, which are implemented as replicated state machines relying on atomic broadcast for consensus on an immutable chain of valid transactions. Sharding is to be understood broadly as techniques for dynamically partitioning nodes in a blockchain system into subsets (shards) that perform storage, communication, and computation tasks without fine-grained synchronization with each other. Despite much recent research on sharding blockchains, much remains to be explored in the design space of these systems. Towards that aim, we conduct a systematic analysis of existing sharding blockchain systems and derive a conceptual decomposition of their architecture into functional components and the underlying assumptions about system models…
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Taxonomy
TopicsBlockchain Technology Applications and Security · Distributed systems and fault tolerance · Caching and Content Delivery
