Erasure-Coded Sharding and Proof-of-Storage for Practical Blockchain Trilemma Balance

Abstract

The simultaneous achievement of scalability, security and decentralisation remains an open problem for distributed ledger technologies. This paper introduces InternxtChain, a novel framework leveraging Internxt's decentralised storage infrastructure with zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) and sharded proof-of-storage (SPoS) consensus. Specifically, erasure-coded sharding ensures data availability and fault tolerance by splitting files into encoded fragments distributed across nodes; BLS-381 aggregated signatures enable efficient consensus by compressing multiple signatures into a single short proof; and zk-SNARK audits provide tamper-evident storage verification without revealing user data. InternxtChain addresses this challenge through three synergistic mechanisms: (i) erasure-coded sharding with (6,3) Reed–Solomon encoding, (ii) zk-SNARKs for storage auditability and (iii) an SPoS consensus based on BLS-381 aggregated signatures. Experimental evaluation on a testbed of 2048 nodes across 16 geographic regions shows that InternxtChain processes 2800 transactions per second (TPS) with a median latency of 420 ms, while maintaining 99.9% data integrity under up to 30% Byzantine nodes. These results establish a practical path toward harmonising Web3 principles with real-world throughput, cost and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) auditability requirements.