A community-based strategy for blockchain sharding: Enabling more budget-friendly transactions
Zixu Zhang, Ying Wang, Guangsheng Yu, Xu Wang, Ming Zhang, Wei Ni, Ren Ping Liu
2023 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)
The promise of blockchain networks is occasionally overshadowed by challenges related to scalability and the escalation of gas fees. A significant portion of these gas fees arises from processing invalid or zero-value transactions, which imposes unnecessary costs and diminishes the technology’s intrinsic value. Sharding, which segments a blockchain into smaller, efficient shards, offers a solution, but determining the most effective partitioning is non-trivial. This paper unveils an innovative, budget-friendly approach to sharding by leveraging community detection algorithms. By clustering tightly-knit transactional communities, our method encourages more intrashard transactions, thus minimizing the higher fees associated with cross-shard transactions. As our experiments demonstrate, the result is a significant 50% reduction in transaction fees. Adopting community detection in the sharding process enhances blockchain scalability and creates a more budget-friendly ecosystem, ensuring users derive maximum value from every transaction.