Chainspace: A Sharded Smart Contracts Platform
This addresses scalability issues for users of decentralized applications, though it is incremental by building on existing sharding and BFT techniques.
Chainspace tackles scalability in decentralized smart contract platforms by sharding state and transaction execution, achieving verifiable correctness and security against Byzantine faults while demonstrating performance improvements through evaluation.
Chainspace is a decentralized infrastructure, known as a distributed ledger, that supports user defined smart contracts and executes user-supplied transactions on their objects. The correct execution of smart contract transactions is verifiable by all. The system is scalable, by sharding state and the execution of transactions, and using S-BAC, a distributed commit protocol, to guarantee consistency. Chainspace is secure against subsets of nodes trying to compromise its integrity or availability properties through Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), and extremely high-auditability, non-repudiation and `blockchain' techniques. Even when BFT fails, auditing mechanisms are in place to trace malicious participants. We present the design, rationale, and details of Chainspace; we argue through evaluating an implementation of the system about its scaling and other features; we illustrate a number of privacy-friendly smart contracts for smart metering, polling and banking and measure their performance.