A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Shard-Based Permissionless Blockchains

Understand

Low transaction throughput and poor scalability are significant issues in public blockchain consensus protocols such as Bitcoins.

• Recent research efforts in this direction have proposed shard-based consensus protocols where the key idea is to split the transactions among multiple committees (or shards), which then process these shards or set of transactions in parallel.
• Such a parallel processing of disjoint sets of transactions or shards by multiple committees significantly improves the overall scalability and transaction throughout of the system.
• However, one significant research gap is a lack of understanding of the strategic behavior of rational processors within committees in such shard-based consensus protocols.