Blockchain has received much attention in recent years. This immense popularity has raised a number of concerns, scalability of blockchain systems being a common one. In this paper, we seek to understand how Ethereum, a well-established blockchain system, would respond to sharding. Sharding is a prevalent technique to increase the scalability of distributed systems. To understand how sharding would affect Ethereum, we model Ethereum blockchain as a graph and evaluate five methods to partition the graph. We analyze the results using three metrics: the balance among shards, the number of transactions that would involve multiple shards, and the amount of data that would be relocated across shards upon a repartitioning of the system.
@article{arxiv.1804.07356,
title = {Challenges and pitfalls of partitioning blockchains},
author = {Enrique Fynn and Fernando Pedone},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.07356},
year = {2018}
}