English

Chainspace: A Sharded Smart Contracts Platform

Cryptography and Security 2017-08-15 v1

Abstract

Chainspace is a decentralized infrastructure, known as a distributed ledger, that supports user defined smart contracts and executes user-supplied transactions on their objects. The correct execution of smart contract transactions is verifiable by all. The system is scalable, by sharding state and the execution of transactions, and using S-BAC, a distributed commit protocol, to guarantee consistency. Chainspace is secure against subsets of nodes trying to compromise its integrity or availability properties through Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), and extremely high-auditability, non-repudiation and `blockchain' techniques. Even when BFT fails, auditing mechanisms are in place to trace malicious participants. We present the design, rationale, and details of Chainspace; we argue through evaluating an implementation of the system about its scaling and other features; we illustrate a number of privacy-friendly smart contracts for smart metering, polling and banking and measure their performance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1708.03778,
  title  = {Chainspace: A Sharded Smart Contracts Platform},
  author = {Mustafa Al-Bassam and Alberto Sonnino and Shehar Bano and Dave Hrycyszyn and George Danezis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.03778},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:13:08.040Z