A Novel Sharding Protocol for Blockchain Scalability Using Random Function Assignment
Rajesh Sharma R, Ellappan Venugopal, Akey Sungheetha, L Vetrivendan, Sheila Mahapatra, C. T. Sivakumar · 2024
Blockchain technology has a major barrier to its expansion, which is scalability. However, current methods have problem of security vulnerabilities and inefficiencies and although sharding has proved to be a good mitigation for this problem, there is no actual implementation of it in any relational database. Our paper explores the improvements to the sharding protocol by integrating the Verifiable Random Functions (VRF) with a feature of reshuffling for optimal distribution on the chain. Verification also showed that our solution provided a transaction through rate that is forty percent higher than the current existing shard handling protocols with only 0.3% error margin on transaction validation standing at 99.7%. Nonetheless, the system effectively addressed the goal of minimizing cross-shard communication by a ratio of 35% though was able to enhance the mean load balancing efficiency by only 28%. Interestingly, our protocol enhances the defense against the takeover of shard from an opponent, an aspect that makes the protocol ideal for large scale application in BFSI and SCM applications. Our results show not only the scalability extension of VRF-based sharding but also the strong security for blockchain system, making sharding a feasible fully-solution for the current enterprise-level blockchain concerns.