I. Introduction
The classical Byzantine consensus protocol, e.g., the Nakamoto consensus [1] adopted by Bitcoin, requires miners to generate new blocks by solving a hash-based puzzle. When one of the miners calculates a nonce value that fits the required difficulty, a new block is generated. Through altering the difficulty parameter, Bitcoin maintains a stable rate of block generation. However, such Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocol does not scale well on the transaction throughput. Thus, Luu et al. [2] proposed a new distributed consensus protocol, called Elastico, for the permissionless blockchains. The key idea of Elastico is to partition the blockchain network into smaller committees. Each committee consists of a group of miners, who collaboratively process a disjoint set of transactions. In this paper, we call the set of disjoint transactions a shard.