Abstract
Sharding has been considered a promising approach to improving blockchain scalability. However, multiple shards result in a large number of cross-shard transactions, which require a long confirmation time across shards and thus restrain the scalability of sharded blockchains. In this paper, we convert the blockchain sharding challenge into a graph partitioning problem on undirected and weighted transaction graphs that capture transaction frequency between blockchain addresses. We propose a new sharding scheme using the community detection algorithm, where blockchain nodes in the same community frequently trade with each other. The detected communities are used as shards for node allocation. The proposed community detection-based sharding scheme is validated using public Ethereum transactions over one million blocks. The proposed community detection-based sharding scheme is able to reduce the ratio of cross-shard transactions from 80% to 20%, as compared to baseline random sharding schemes, and retain the ratio of around 20% over the examined one million blocks.
Supported by BT Group Plc.
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Notes
- 1.
Due to the limited computational capacity, the local computer can only handle up to 90 addresses.
- 2.
0x7be8076f4ea4a4ad08075c2508e481d6c946d12b, https://opensea.io/.
- 3.
0x503828976d22510aad0201ac7ec88293211d23da, https://www.coinbase.com/.
- 4.
0xd3d2e2692501a5c9ca623199d38826e513033a17, https://uniswap.org/.
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Acknowledgement
This work was supported by BT Group plc through the Project “ Blockchain based Workflow and Policy Management Platform”.
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Zhang, Z. et al. (2022). A Community Detection-Based Blockchain Sharding Scheme. In: Chen, S., Shyamasundar, R.K., Zhang, LJ. (eds) Blockchain – ICBC 2022. ICBC 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13733. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23495-8_6
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