RapidChain: Scaling Blockchain via Full Sharding

By Mahdi Zamani, Mahnush Movahedi, Mariana Raykova. Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2018

1,122 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A major approach to overcoming the performance and scalability limitations of current blockchain protocols is to use sharding which is to split the overheads of processing transactions among multiple, smaller groups of nodes. These groups work in parallel to maximize performance while requiring significantly smaller communication, computation, and storage per node, allowing the system to scale to large networks. However, existing sharding-based blockchain protocols still require a linear amount of communication (in the number of participants) per transaction, and hence, attain only partially the potential benefits of sharding. We show that this introduces a major bottleneck to the throughput and latency of these protocols. Aside from the limited scalability, these protocols achieve weak security guarantees due to either a small fault resiliency (e.g., 1/8 and 1/4) or high failure probability, or they rely on strong assumptions (e.g., trusted setup) that limit their applicability to mainstream payment systems. We propose RapidChain, the first sharding-based public blockchain protocol that is resilient to Byzantine faults from up to a 1/3 fraction of its participants, and achieves complete sharding of the communication, computation, and storage overhead of processing transactions without assuming any trusted setup. RapidChain employs an optimal intra-committee consensus algorithm that can achieve very high throughputs via block pipelining, a novel gossiping protocol for large blocks, and a provably-secure reconfiguration mechanism to ensure robustness. Using an efficient cross-shard transaction verification technique, our protocol avoids gossiping transactions to the entire network. Our empirical evaluations suggest that RapidChain can process (and confirm) more than 7,300 tx/sec with an expected confirmation latency of roughly 8.7 seconds in a network of 4,000 nodes with an overwhelming time-to-failure of more than 4,500 years.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/160995fa72e82bdde408fe0a554575c67ad6e888

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Citations in the corpus

Towards Scaling Blockchain Systems via Sharding (2018, methodology): “es, to divide the blockchain network into smaller committees so as to reduce the overhead of consensus protocols. Examples of sharded blockchains include Elastico [33], OmniLedger [27] and RapidChain [49]. These systems, however, are limited to cryptocurrency applications in an open (or permissionle”
A Survey on Consensus Mechanisms and Mining Strategy Management in Blockchain Networks (2018, methodology): “On the shard level, RapidChain requires the members of each BFT-committee to run also the distributed randomness generation protocol and generate a local random string.”
A Scalable Multi-Layer PBFT Consensus for Blockchain (2020, background): “Another signiﬁcant evolution path is sharding, where shards have their own consensus group; hence the transactions can be conﬁrmed within a short time because of the smaller size network [18], [19].”
Survey on blockchain based smart contracts: Applications, opportunities and challenges (2021, background): “ments [272], [273], [274] • Shrading [275] , [276]”
Monoxide: Scale out Blockchains with Asynchronous Consensus Zones (2019, background): “In summary, the existing proposals targeting on the single chain and non-sharding solution [42, 41, 43, 15, 29, 24, 18] are bound to the network bandwidth and cannot scale out; while the sharding systems either do not support full sharding [32], or may lower the attack bar after sharding [23, 47].”
A Full Dive Into Realizing the Edge-Enabled Metaverse: Visions, Enabling Technologies, and Challenges (2022, background): “blockchain so that a significant number of connections can be accommodated in the Metaverse [267].”
SoK: Consensus in the Age of Blockchains (2017, methodology): “RapidChain [97] uses an inter-committee routing protocol based on Kademlia [71] allowing node discovery and message routing in O(log(n)) steps (where n is the number of nodes in the system).”
Solutions to Scalability of Blockchain: A Survey (2020, background): “RapidChain [13] is a sharding-based public blockchain protocol that is resilient to Byzantine faults up to a 1/3 fraction of the participants, which is better than the”