The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Blockchain protocols are notoriously bad at scaling. Most protocols do work reasonably well when used in a small scale. Yet, as the network size grows, resources are added and overall computing power increases, most protocols simply do not scale. This is largely due to the fact that the entire process is fully replicated by all participants. Surpassing some desired redundancy threshold, this offers no advantage. We tackle the issue by introducing a formal general framework for sharding blockchain protocols. We prove that all sharded protocols obtained by applying our framework live up to the same safety and liveness guarantees as their non-sharded counterparts. A concrete demonstration of the framework is also provided, by sharding the recently proposed Algorand protocol.