Jenga: Orchestrating Smart Contracts in Sharding-Based Blockchain for Efficient Processing

Abstract

Sharding is a promising way to achieve blockchain scalability, increasing the throughput by partitioning nodes into multiple smaller groups, splitting the workload. However, when tackling the increasingly important smart contracts, existing blockchain sharding protocols do not scale well. They usually require complex multi-round cross-shard consensus protocols for contract execution and extensive cross-shard communication during state transmission, mainly because that each shard stores and executes an isolated, disjoint subset of contracts. In this paper, we present Jenga, a novel sharding-based approach for efficient smart contract processing. Its main idea is to break the isolation between shards by orchestrating the logic storage, state storage, and execution of smart contracts. In Jenga, all shards share the logic for all contracts. Therefore, multiple contracts involved in a smart contract transaction can be executed together by the same shard within one round. Moreover, different shards store distinct states (named state shards), several "orthogonal" execution channels are established based on the state shards, where each channel overlaps with all shards. Each node simultaneously belongs to a shard and an "orthogonal" channel, different channels execute different contracts. Therefore, via the overlapped nodes, the contract states can be directly broadcast between the state shards and the execution channels without additional cross-shard communication. We implement Jenga and evaluation results show that it provides outstanding performance gains in terms of throughput and transaction confirmation latency.