Proceedings ArticleDOI
A Secure Sharding Protocol For Open Blockchains
Loi Luu,Viswesh Narayanan,Chaodong Zheng,Kunal Baweja,Seth Gilbert,Prateek Saxena +5 more
- pp 17-30
TLDR
ELASTICO is the first candidate for a secure sharding protocol with presence of byzantine adversaries, and scalability experiments on Amazon EC2 with up to $1, 600$ nodes confirm ELASTICO's theoretical scaling properties.Abstract:
Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and 250 similar alt-coins, embody at their core a blockchain protocol --- a mechanism for a distributed network of computational nodes to periodically agree on a set of new transactions. Designing a secure blockchain protocol relies on an open challenge in security, that of designing a highly-scalable agreement protocol open to manipulation by byzantine or arbitrarily malicious nodes. Bitcoin's blockchain agreement protocol exhibits security, but does not scale: it processes 3--7 transactions per second at present, irrespective of the available computation capacity at hand. In this paper, we propose a new distributed agreement protocol for permission-less blockchains called ELASTICO. ELASTICO scales transaction rates almost linearly with available computation for mining: the more the computation power in the network, the higher the number of transaction blocks selected per unit time. ELASTICO is efficient in its network messages and tolerates byzantine adversaries of up to one-fourth of the total computational power. Technically, ELASTICO uniformly partitions or parallelizes the mining network (securely) into smaller committees, each of which processes a disjoint set of transactions (or "shards"). While sharding is common in non-byzantine settings, ELASTICO is the first candidate for a secure sharding protocol with presence of byzantine adversaries. Our scalability experiments on Amazon EC2 with up to $1, 600$ nodes confirm ELASTICO's theoretical scaling properties.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Scaling Blockchains with Error Correction Codes: A Survey on Coded Blockchains
TL;DR: The use of coded blocks or shards that allows participants to store only a fraction of the total blockchain, protect against malicious nodes or erasures due to nodes leaving a blockchain system, ensure data availability in order to promote transparency, and scale the security of sharded blockchains are considered.
Peer Review
5th International Symposium on Foundations and Applications of Blockchain 2022 (FAB 2022)
TL;DR: It is argued that for Blockchains to thrive and reach Billions of users, the authors should expect a much more regulated landscape to emerge and discuss some exciting opportunities in reg-crypto and RegDeFi.
From Controlled Data-Center Environments to Open Distributed Environments: Scalable, Efficient, and Robust Systems with Extended Functionality
TL;DR: This dissertation proposes new system designs and optimizations that address scalability and efficiency of distributed data management systems in cloud environments and proposes AC3WN, the first correct cross-chain commitment protocol that guarantees atomicity of cross- Chain transactions in permissionless blockchain transaction processing.
Journal ArticleDOI
Benzene: Scaling Blockchain With Cooperation-Based Sharding
TL;DR: Zhang et al. as mentioned in this paper proposed a double-chain architecture for function decoupling, which separates transaction-recording functions from consensus-execution functions, thereby enabling the cross-shard cooperation during consensus execution while preserving the concurrency nature of sharding.
Book ChapterDOI
Resource Burning for Permissionless Systems (Invited Paper)
TL;DR: Proof-of-work puzzles and CAPTCHAS are examples of resource burning: verifiable consumption of resources solely to convey information.
References
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Proceedings ArticleDOI
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