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Sharding for Scalable Blockchain Networks

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Abstract

Blockchain technology has been extended from bitcoin transactions to applications in multiple domains. Scalability has been identified as a major challenge in large-scale blockchain networks because of the number of possible participants. Scalability becomes a consideration because the blockchain distributed ledger is replicated at all participating nodes, and the block validation process may experience transaction throughput, storage, latency, and energy consumption hurdles. Sharding is a database technique adopted in blockchain technology to attempt to resolve the scalability issue. Sharding enables parallelization of transactions to improve transaction throughput in a blockchain network where a single ledger is shared in each shard to optimize the storage issue of blockchain scalability. Herein, we present a detailed review focusing on scalability challenges in blockchain and solutions provided by database sharding to resolve these challenges. Various sharding consensus protocols are examined along with our insights into existing solutions. Extensive open challenges are provided in this research for future researchers, including cross-shard communication overhead, shard formation, node assignment to shards, optimal number of shards in a network and shard takeover attacks.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by Zayed Center for Health Sciences, the United Arab Emirates University, Grant number 31R180.

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  1. Khaled Shuaib and Nazar Zaki contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Information Technology, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates

    Faiza Hashim, Khaled Shuaib & Nazar Zaki

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  1. Faiza Hashim
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Correspondence to Faiza Hashim.

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Hashim, F., Shuaib, K. & Zaki, N. Sharding for Scalable Blockchain Networks. SN COMPUT. SCI. 4, 2 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-022-01435-z

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