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Towards Solving the Data Availability Problem for Sharded Ethereum

Published: 10 December 2018 Publication History

Abstract

The success and growing popularity of blockchain technology has lead to a significant increase in load on popular permissionless blockchains such as Ethereum. With the current design, these blockchain systems do not scale with additional nodes since every node executes every transaction. Further efforts are therefore necessary to develop scalable permissionless blockchain systems.
In this paper, we provide an aggregated overview of the current research on the Ethereum blockchain towards solving the scalability challenge. We focus on the concept of sharding, which aims to break the restriction of every participant being required to execute every transaction and store the entire state. This concept however introduces new complexities in the form of stateless clients, which leads to a new challenge: how to guarantee that critical data is published and stays available for as long as it is relevant.
We present an approach towards solving the data availability problem (DAP) that leverages synergy effects by reusing the validators from Casper. We then propose two distinct approaches for reliable collation proposal, state transition, and state verification in shard chains. One approach is based on verification by committees of Casper validators that execute transactions in proposed blocks using witness data provided by executors. The other approach relies on a proof of execution provided by the executor proposing the block and a challenge game, where other executors verify the proof. Both concepts rely on executors for long-term storage of shard chain state.

References

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Vitalik Buterin. 2016. Ethereum white paper: A next-generation smart contract and decentralized application platform. First version (2014).
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Vitalik Buterin. 2017. A note on data availability and erasure coding. Ethereum Research Wiki on GitHub. https://github.com/ethereum/research/wiki/A-note-on-data-availability-and-erasure-coding
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Justin Drake and Vitalik Buterin. 2018. Expanding on proposer/notary separation. Ethereum Research Forum. https://ethresear.ch/t/expanding-on-proposer-notary-separation/1691/11
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cover image ACM Conferences
SERIAL'18: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Scalable and Resilient Infrastructures for Distributed Ledgers
December 2018
35 pages
ISBN:9781450361101
DOI:10.1145/3284764
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 10 December 2018

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Author Tags

  1. Blockchain
  2. Data Availability
  3. Distributed Systems
  4. Ethereum
  5. Proof of Stake
  6. Sharding

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  • Research
  • Refereed limited

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Middleware '18
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  • USENIX Assoc
  • IFIP

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  • (2024)Tethering Layer 2 solutions to the blockchainComputer Communications10.1016/j.comcom.2024.07.017225:C(289-310)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2024
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  • (2023)GT-NRSM: efficient and scalable sharding consensus mechanism for consortium blockchainThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-023-05414-w79:17(20041-20075)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2023
  • (2022)An Effective Sharding Consensus Algorithm for Blockchain SystemsElectronics10.3390/electronics1116259711:16(2597)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2022
  • (2021)Resource Analysis of Ethereum 2.0 Clients2021 3rd Conference on Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services (BRAINS)10.1109/BRAINS52497.2021.9569812(1-8)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2021
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  • (2019)Empirically Analyzing Ethereum's Gas Mechanism2019 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW)10.1109/EuroSPW.2019.00041(310-319)Online publication date: Jun-2019

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