A survey on efficient parallelization of blockchain-based smart contracts
This is an incremental survey that reviews existing methods for improving efficiency in blockchain-based smart contracts, targeting developers and researchers in the field.
The paper addresses the problem of high time and computational power needed for consensus in smart contract platforms by surveying state-of-the-art approaches for efficient and scalable computation, with a focus on sharding as a method for parallelization.
The main problem faced by smart contract platforms is the amount of time and computational power required to reach consensus. In a classical blockchain model, each operation is in fact performed by each node, both to update the status and to validate the results of the calculations performed by others. In this short survey we sketch some state-of-the-art approaches to obtain an efficient and scalable computation of smart contracts. Particular emphasis is given to sharding, a promising method that allows parallelization and therefore a more efficient management of the computational resources of the network.