2020 IEEE International Symposium
on Information Theory
21-26 June 2020 • Los Angeles, California, USA
| Paper ID | D.2.3 | ||
| Paper Title | PolyShard: Coded Sharding Achieves Linearly Scaling Efficiency and Security Simultaneously | ||
| Authors | Songze Li, Mingchao Yu, Chien-Sheng Yang, A. Salman Avestimehr, University of Southern California, United States; Sreeram Kannan, University of Washington, United States; Pramod Viswanath, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States | ||
| Session | D.2: Coding for Specialized Computations | ||
| Presentation | Lecture | ||
| Track | Coded and Distributed Computation | ||
| Manuscript | Click here to download the manuscript | ||
| Virtual Presentation | Click here to watch in the Virtual Symposium | ||
| Abstract | Today's blockchain designs suffer from a trilemma claiming that no blockchain system can simultaneously achieve decentralization, security, and performance scalability. For current blockchain systems, as more nodes join the network, the efficiency of the system (computation, communication, and storage) stays constant at best. A leading idea for enabling blockchains to scale efficiency is the notion of sharding: different subsets of nodes handle different portions of the blockchain, thereby reducing the load for each individual node. However, existing sharding proposals achieve efficiency scaling by compromising on trust - corrupting the nodes in a given shard will lead to the permanent loss of the corresponding portion of data. In this paper, we settle the trilemma by demonstrating a new protocol for coded storage and computation in blockchains. In particular, we propose PolyShard: ``polynomially coded sharding'' scheme that achieves information-theoretic upper bounds on the efficiency of the storage, system throughput, as well as on trust, thus enabling a truly scalable system. | ||
Plan Ahead
2021 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory
11-16 July 2021 | Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
