Paper Info
Title
PolyShard: Coded Sharding Achieves Linearly Scaling Efficiency and Security Simultaneously
Abstract
AbstractToday’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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/TIFS.2020.3009610
Periodicals
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Throughput, Scalability, Encoding, Secure storage, Time measurement, Scalability, blockchain, security and trust, decentralized networks, coded sharding, information theory
Journal
16
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1556-6013
5
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.51
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Songze Li113416.22
Mingchao Yu2152.70
Yang Chien-Sheng350.51
Amir Salman Avestimehr41880157.39
Sreeram Kannan512021.76
Viswanath, P.61330179.87