Divide and Scale: Formalization of Distributed Ledger Sharding Protocols

Avarikioti, Georgia; Desjardins, Antoine; Kokoris-Kogias, Eleftherios; Wattenhofer, Roger

doi:10.48550/arxiv.1910.10434

Cited by 6 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 16 publications

(45 reference statements)

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“…Required properties of sharding protocols [136] Consistency and Scalability Authors proposed an analytical model to evaluate whether a protocol for sharded distributed ledgers fulfills necessary properties. Vulnerability by forking attacks [137] Hashrate power, net cost of an attack Authors proposed fine-grained vulnerability analytical model of blockchain networks incurred by intentional forking attacks taking the advantages of large deviation theory.…”

Section: Analytical Models For Blockchain Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A Survey of State-of-the-Art on Blockchains: Theories, Modelings, and Tools

Huang,

Kong,

Zhou

et al. 2020

Preprint

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To draw a roadmap of current research activities of the blockchain community, we first conduct a brief overview of state-of-theart blockchain surveys published in the recent 5 years. We found that those surveys are basically studying the blockchain-based applications, such as blockchain-assisted Internet of Things (IoT), business applications, security-enabled solutions, and many other applications in diverse fields. However, we think that a comprehensive survey towards the essentials of blockchains by exploiting the state-of-the-art theoretical modelings, analytic models, and useful experiment tools is still missing. To fill this gap, we perform a thorough survey by identifying and classifying the most recent high-quality research outputs that are closely related to the theoretical findings and essential mechanisms of blockchain systems and networks. Several promising open issues are also summarized finally for future research directions. We wish this survey can serve as a useful guideline for researchers, engineers, and educators about the cutting-edge development of blockchains in the perspectives of theories, modelings, and tools. CCS Concepts: • General and reference → Surveys and overviews; • Computer systems organization → Dependable and faulttolerant systems and networks; • Networks → Peer-to-peer architectures;

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Section: Analytical Models For Blockchain Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, the properties of a sharded blockchain under a fully adaptive adversary are still unknown. To this end, Avarikioti et al [136] defined the consistency and scalability for sharded blockchain protocol. The limitations of security and efficiency of sharding protocols were also derived.…”

Section: Analytical Models For Blockchain Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Survey of State-of-the-Art on Blockchains: Theories, Modelings, and Tools

Huang,

Kong,

Zhou

et al. 2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Layer 2 protocols [13,36,25,34], handling transactions off-chain, sharding protocols [19,23,30,46,12,42,3], and moving from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) [18] are amongst the most adopted scaling solutions. In addition to the development of the aforementioned solutions, the potential of concurrency control for multithreaded execution has been explored thoroughly.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

DeFi and NFTs Hinder Blockchain Scalability

Heimbach¹,

Kneip²,

Vonlanthen³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Many classical blockchains are known to have an embarrassingly low transaction throughput, down to Bitcoin's notorious seven transactions per second limit. Various proposals and implementations for increasing throughput emerged in the first decade of blockchain research. But how much concurrency is possible? In their early days, blockchains were mostly used for simple transfers from user to user. More recently, however, decentralized finance (DeFi) and NFT marketplaces have completely changed what is happening on blockchains. Both are built using smart contracts and have gained significant popularity. Transactions on DeFi and NFT marketplaces often interact with the same smart contracts. We believe this development has transformed blockchain usage. In our work, we perform a historical analysis of Ethereum's transaction graph. We study how much interaction between transactions there was historically and how much there is now. We find that the rise of DeFi and NFT marketplaces has led to an increase in "centralization" in the transaction graph. More transactions are now interconnected: currently there are around 200 transactions per block with 4000 interdependencies between them. We further find that the parallelizability of Ethereum's current interconnected transaction workload is limited. A speedup exceeding a factor of five is currently unrealistic.

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“…The light client that trust the gadget do not need to have the full chain or actively listen to the network. This can in turn enable scalability [4] in an ecosystem of multiple chains (weather sharding [12,1,2] or heterogeneous [18]), where no single party receives or stores all the data in the system.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

GRANDPA: a Byzantine Finality Gadget

Stewart¹,

Kokoris-Kogia²

2020

Preprint

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Classic Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols forfeit liveness in the face of asynchrony in order to preserve safety, whereas most deployed blockchain protocols forfeit safety in order to remain live. In this work, we achieve the best of both worlds by proposing a novel abstractions called the finality gadget. A finality gadget allows for transactions to always optimistically commit but informs the clients that these transactions might be unsafe. As a result, a blockchain can execute transactions optimistically and only commit them after they have been sufficiently and provably audited. In this work, we formally model the finality gadget abstraction, prove that it is impossible to solve it deterministically in full asynchrony (even though it is stronger than consensus) and provide a partially synchronous protocol which is currently securing a major blockchain. This way we show that the protocol designer can decouple safety and liveness in order to speed up recovery from failures. We believe that there can be other types of finality gadgets that provide weaker safety (e.g., probabilistic) in order to gain more efficiency and this can depend on the probability that the network is not in synchrony.

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Divide and Scale: Formalization of Distributed Ledger Sharding Protocols

Cited by 6 publications

References 16 publications

A Survey of State-of-the-Art on Blockchains: Theories, Modelings, and Tools

A Survey of State-of-the-Art on Blockchains: Theories, Modelings, and Tools

DeFi and NFTs Hinder Blockchain Scalability

GRANDPA: a Byzantine Finality Gadget

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