SoK: Public Blockchain Sharding

TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews public blockchain sharding, highlighting its core components, challenges, and recent advancements, and compares different protocols to identify current limitations and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive systemization of knowledge on blockchain sharding, summarizing recent achievements and analyzing performance and constraints of various protocols.

Findings

Sharding significantly increases blockchain throughput.

Current protocols face challenges like security and scalability.

Future research should address protocol limitations.

Abstract

Blockchain's decentralization, transparency, and tamper-resistance properties have facilitated the system's use in various application fields. However, the low throughput and high confirmation latency hinder the widespread adoption of Blockchain. Many solutions have been proposed to address these issues, including first-layer solutions (or on-chain solutions) and second-layer solutions (or off-chain solutions). Among the proposed solutions, the blockchain sharding system is the most scalable one, where the nodes in the network are divided into several groups. The nodes in different shards work in parallel to validate the transactions and add them to the blocks, and in such a way, the throughput increases significantly. However, previous works have not adequately summarized the latest achievements in blockchain sharding, nor have they fully showcased its state-of-the-art. Our study provides a systemization of knowledge of public blockchain sharding, including the core components of sharding systems, challenges, limitations, and mechanisms of the latest sharding protocols. We also compare their performance and discuss current constraints and future research directions.