Low Latency Cross-Shard Transactions in Coded Blockchain
This addresses scalability issues in blockchain networks for applications like cryptocurrencies, though it appears incremental over prior coded sharding work.
The paper tackles the blockchain trilemma (performance, security, decentralization) by improving a coded sharding scheme, achieving low-latency cross-shard transactions through a 2-Dimensional Sharding strategy, distributed storage for block propagation, and polynomial cryptographic primitives.
Although blockchain, the supporting technology of Bitcoin and various cryptocurrencies, has offered a potentially effective framework for numerous applications, it still suffers from the adverse affects of the impossibility triangle. Performance, security, and decentralization of blockchains normally do not scale simultaneously with the number of participants in the network. The recent introduction of error correcting codes in sharded blockchain by Li et al. partially settles this trilemma, boosting throughput without compromising security and decentralization. In this paper, we improve the coded sharding scheme in three ways. First, we propose a novel 2-Dimensional Sharding strategy, which inherently supports cross-shard transactions, alleviating the need for complicated inter-shard communication protocols. Second, we employ distributed storage techniques in the propagation of blocks, improving latency under restricted bandwidth. Finally, we incorporate polynomial cryptographic primitives of low degree, which brings coded blockchain techniques into the realm of feasible real-world parameters.