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Free2Shard: Adversary-resistant Distributed Resource Allocation for Blockchains

Authors:

Sreeram Kannan,

Pramod ViswanathAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems, Volume 6, Issue 1

Article No.: 11, Pages 1 - 38

https://doi.org/10.1145/3508031

Published: 28 February 2022 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we study a canonical distributed resource allocation problem arising in blockchains. While distributed resource allocation is a well-studied problem in networking, the blockchain setting additionally requires the solution to be resilient to adversarial behavior from a fraction of nodes. Scaling blockchain performance is a basic research topic; a plethora of solutions (under the umbrella of sharding ) have been proposed in recent years. Although the various sharding solutions share a common thread (they cryptographically stitch together multiple parallel chains), architectural differences lead to differing resource allocation problems. In this paper we make three main contributions: (a) we categorize the different sharding proposals under a common architectural framework, allowing for the emergence of a new, uniformly improved, uni-consensus sharding architecture. (b) We formulate and exactly solve a core resource allocation problem in the uni-consensus sharding architecture -- our solution, Free2shard, is adversary-resistant and achieves optimal throughput. The key technical contribution is a mathematical connection to the classical work of Blackwell approachability in dynamic game theory. (c) We implement the sharding architecture atop a full-stack blockchain in 3000 lines of code in Rust -- we achieve a throughput of more than 250,000 transactions per second with 6 shards, a vast improvement over state-of-the-art.

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Cited By

Li MLin YZhang JWang W(2023)CoChain: High Concurrency Blockchain Sharding via Consensus on ConsensusIEEE INFOCOM 2023 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM53939.2023.10228892(1-10)Online publication date: 17-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM53939.2023.10228892
Pigaglio MKról MRiviére E(2023)Exploring Locality in Ethereum Transactions2023 5th Conference on Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services (BRAINS)10.1109/BRAINS59668.2023.10317054(1-8)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/BRAINS59668.2023.10317054
Liu XXie HYan ZLiang X(2023)A survey on blockchain shardingISA Transactions10.1016/j.isatra.2023.06.029141(30-43)Online publication date: Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isatra.2023.06.029
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Free2Shard: Adversary-resistant Distributed Resource Allocation for Blockchains

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SIGMETRICS/PERFORMANCE '22: Abstract Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGMETRICS/IFIP PERFORMANCE Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems

Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems Volume 6, Issue 1

POMACS

March 2022

695 pages

EISSN:2476-1249

DOI:10.1145/3522731

Editors:
Augustin Chaintreau
Columbia University
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Leana Golubchik
University of Southern California
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Zhi-Li Zhang
University of Minnesota

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Published: 28 February 2022

Published in POMACS Volume 6, Issue 1

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Cited By

Li MLin YZhang JWang W(2023)CoChain: High Concurrency Blockchain Sharding via Consensus on ConsensusIEEE INFOCOM 2023 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM53939.2023.10228892(1-10)Online publication date: 17-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM53939.2023.10228892
Pigaglio MKról MRiviére E(2023)Exploring Locality in Ethereum Transactions2023 5th Conference on Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services (BRAINS)10.1109/BRAINS59668.2023.10317054(1-8)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/BRAINS59668.2023.10317054
Liu XXie HYan ZLiang X(2023)A survey on blockchain shardingISA Transactions10.1016/j.isatra.2023.06.029141(30-43)Online publication date: Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isatra.2023.06.029
David BMagri BMatt CNielsen JTschudi DYin HStavrou ACremers CShi E(2022)GearBoxProceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3548606.3559375(683-696)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3548606.3559375

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