OmniLedger: A Secure, Scale-Out, Decentralized Ledger via Sharding

By Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Philipp Jovanovic, Linus Gasser, Nicolas Gailly, Ewa Syta, Bryan Ford. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2018

1,172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Designing a secure permissionless distributed ledger (blockchain) that performs on par with centralized payment processors, such as Visa, is a challenging task. Most existing distributed ledgers are unable to scale-out, i.e., to grow their total processing capacity with the number of validators; and those that do, compromise security or decentralization. We present OmniLedger, a novel scale-out distributed ledger that preserves longterm security under permissionless operation. It ensures security and correctness by using a bias-resistant public-randomness protocol for choosing large, statistically representative shards that process transactions, and by introducing an efficient cross-shard commit protocol that atomically handles transactions affecting multiple shards. OmniLedger also optimizes performance via parallel intra-shard transaction processing, ledger pruning via collectively-signed state blocks, and low-latency "trust-but-verify" validation for low-value transactions. An evaluation of our experimental prototype shows that OmniLedger’s throughput scales linearly in the number of active validators, supporting Visa-level workloads and beyond, while confirming typical transactions in under two seconds.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/489e2f7c4bce3939395930b7ec6cb3ac52660875

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Citations in the corpus

RapidChain: Scaling Blockchain via Full Sharding (2018, background): “2.2.3 OmniLedger.”
Solutions to Scalability of Blockchain: A Survey (2020, methodology): “[12] E. Kokoris-Kogias, P. Jovanovic, L. Gasser, N. Gailly, E. Syta, and B. Ford, ‘‘OmniLedger: A secure, scale-out, decentralized ledger via sharding,’’ in Proc.”
A Survey of Blockchain Technology Applied to Smart Cities: Research Issues and Challenges (2019, background): “Elastico [233] and OmniLedger [234] are two examples of sharding blockchain systems.”
Narwhal and Tusk: a DAG-based mempool and efficient BFT consensus (2021, background): “In this paper we do not deal with sharding since our consensus algorithm can obviously interface with any sharded blockchain [4, 8, 27, 36].”
Monoxide: Scale out Blockchains with Asynchronous Consensus Zones (2019, methodology): “This model is used by Bitcoin and many blockchain systems [11, 32, 23].”
SoK: Consensus in the Age of Blockchains (2017, methodology): “Omniledger uses cryptographic sortition to select a subset of the committee to be swapped out and replaced with newmembers.”
A Survey on Consensus Mechanisms and Mining Strategy Management in Blockchain Networks (2018, methodology): “In [180], OmniLedger uses UTXO to represent the client’s balance state.”
A Survey on Blockchain Interoperability: Past, Present, and Future Trends (2020, background): “…, or satellite chain , or child chain ) is a mechanism for two existing blockchains to interoperate [13, 77], scale (e.g., via blockchain shard-ing [107]), and be upgraded [196] in which one blockchain ( main chain or mainchain) considers another blockchain as an extension of itself (the…”
SBFT: A Scalable and Decentralized Trust Infrastructure (2018, methodology): “Both BizCoin [43], [71] and Omniledger [44] have GitHub repositories but have only reported simulation results.”
Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering, and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges (2019, background): “• Sharded blockchain systems Several sharded blockchain systems have been explored in both academia (e.g. [ 29]) and industry (e.g. [ 10]).”
A Vademecum on Blockchain Technologies: When, Which, and How (2019, background): “For Tendermint and other less known protocols [299], [300], [301] random committee selection is”