USING SHARDING TO IMPROVE BLOCKCHAIN NETWORK SCALABILITY

Abstract

Blockchain is a distributed and decentralized database for recording transactions. It is shared and maintained by network nodes, which ensures its operations using cryptography and consensus rules that allow all nodes to agree on a unique structure of the blockchain. However, modern blockchain solutions face network scalability issues due to different protocol design decisions. In this paper, we discuss sharding as a possible solution to overcome the technical limitations of existing blockchain systems and different forms of its practical realization presented in recent research spurred by blockchain popularity.