Scaling-out blockchains with sharding: an extensive survey
Guangsheng Yu, Xu Wang, Kan Yu, Wei Ni, J. Andrew Zhang, Ren Ping Liu · 2020
The blockchain technology, featured with its decentralized tamper -resistance based on a peer -to -peer (P2P) network, has been widely applied in financial applications and even further been extended to industrial applications. However, the weak scalability of traditional blockchain technology severely affects the wide adoption due to the well-known trilemma of decentralization-security-scalability in block chains. In regards to this issue, a number of solutions have been proposed, targeting to boost the scalability while preserving the decentralization and security. They range from modifying the on -chain data structure and consensus algorithms to adding the off -chain technologies. Therein, one of the most practical methods to achieve horizontal scalability along with the increasing network size is sharding, by partitioning network into multiple shards so that the overhead of duplicating communication, storage, and computation in each full node can be avoided.