Service-Oriented Sharding with Aspen
This addresses scalability and security issues for developers and users of loosely-coupled services on blockchains, representing a novel method rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of scaling blockchain-based services by introducing Aspen, a sharded protocol that securely accommodates an increasing number of services without compromising security or flooding users with irrelevant messages.
The rise of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies has led to an explosion of services using distributed ledgers as their underlying infrastructure. However, due to inherently single-service oriented blockchain protocols, such services can bloat the existing ledgers, fail to provide sufficient security, or completely forego the property of trustless auditability. Security concerns, trust restrictions, and scalability limits regarding the resource requirements of users hamper the sustainable development of loosely-coupled services on blockchains. This paper introduces Aspen, a sharded blockchain protocol designed to securely scale with increasing number of services. Aspen shares the same trust model as Bitcoin in a peer-to-peer network that is prone to extreme churn containing Byzantine participants. It enables introduction of new services without compromising the security, leveraging the trust assumptions, or flooding users with irrelevant messages.