A New Proof-of-Stake Sharding Architecture for Public Blockchains

Abstract

This paper proposes a sharding architecture solution for public blockchains aiming for significantly improving the transaction processing performance. The solution uses the Proof-of-Stake Voting (PoSV) consensus protocol proposed by Tomochain for intra-shard consensus because PoSV provides 2 second block-time and fast confirmation time. The paper identifies and solves cross-shard transactions for smart contract call chaining and data availability problem in shard reshuffling. Specifically, we propose a cross-shard smart contract transaction scheme combined with a new smart contract deployment strategy that places dependent smart contracts onto the same shard. Moreover, we also address the data availability problem in state sharding when shard reshuffling takes place.