Sharding Blockchain
Sherman S. M. Chow, Ziliang Lai, Chris Liu, Eric Lo, Yongjun Zhao · 2018
Ever since the success of Bitcoin, blockchain technology has enabled countless decentralized applications. However, one major issue of blockchain is scalability. Taking Bitcoin as an example, its maximum transaction throughput is estimated to be less than 10 transactions per second, which is restricted by the constant block size and the constant average confirmation time per block of the Bitcoin blockchain. Some other cryptocurrencies that use similar blockchain technology, such as Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash, increase their throughput by enlarging these two constants. Yet, none of them achieves similar throughput of mainstream payment networks like Visa (over 1500 transaction/s) or Paypal (~200 transactions/s). A more serious problem is that we cannot increase these two parameters arbitrarily. Doing so may damage the underlying decentralized consensus protocol, as well as increase the cost of running full nodes. The performance bottleneck hinders blockchain's applicability, especially in resource-constrained platforms such as IoT.