Sharded Permissioned Distributed Ledgers for Parallel Processing
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Solution Overview
Problem
Traditional distributed ledgers, including blockchains, face scalability issues due to the need for all participants to communicate, process, and store all transactions, leading to limited throughput and inefficiency, especially in permissionless systems, and existing consensus algorithms like PoW and PBFT do not scale well with large numbers of nodes.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a sharded, permissioned distributed ledger system that splits the ledger into multiple shards, each maintained by a subset of nodes, allowing parallel transaction processing and using consensus mechanisms like BFT Raft to ensure integrity and accountability, with dynamic resource allocation and entanglement techniques to prevent corruption.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If all participants communicate, process and store all transactions in a traditional distributed ledger, then ledger integrity and security are maintained, but throughput is fundamentally limited and additional resources do not translate to improved performance
Solution Approach 1:
The distributed ledger is divided into multiple shards, where each shard is a separate ledger maintained by a subset of nodes. This segmentation allows parallel transaction processing across shards, enabling throughput to scale with additional resources while maintaining ledger integrity through cryptographic hashing that links shards to the main ledger.
2Adaptability or versatility
If permissionless blockchain allows any node to participate, then decentralization and censorship resistance are achieved, but system efficiency deteriorates due to deliberate inefficiency and energy expenditure requirements
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements dynamic permissioning where node participation rights are not static but can be granted, revoked, or modified based on system state, performance requirements, and governance decisions. This allows the system to optimize efficiency by controlling participation while maintaining adaptability to different operational needs.
3Reliability
If permissioned ledger restricts participation to certain nodes, then governance and compliance are improved, but scalability is limited by the fixed participant set
Solution Approach 1:
The permissioned ledger is segmented into multiple shards that can be independently scaled. Each shard can be assigned to specific authorized nodes based on their capabilities and permissions, allowing the system to scale by adding more shards and participating nodes while maintaining governance control through the permissioning mechanism.
4Reliability
If consensus algorithm requires large fraction of participants to validate all transactions, then ledger security is maintained, but throughput is limited and does not scale with node count
Solution Approach 1:
Transaction validation is segmented across shards, where each shard is validated by a subset of nodes rather than requiring all participants to validate all transactions. This maintains security through cryptographic hashing and consensus within each shard while enabling parallel validation that scales with the number of nodes.
5Productivity
If multiple independent blockchains are used to reduce pressure, then load is distributed, but resources dedicated to maintaining each chain are insufficient and integrity is undermined
Solution Approach 1:
Multiple shards are merged into a unified sharded ledger system where each shard is cryptographically linked to the main ledger through hashing. This combining approach distributes load across shards while maintaining integrity through the cryptographic connections that ensure all shards collectively represent the complete ledger state.
Data Source
AI summary
A sharded, permissioned, distributed ledger may reduce the amount of work and communication required by each participant, thus possibly avoiding scalability bottlenecks that may be inherent in previous distributed ledger implementations and possibly enabling the use of additional resources to translate to increased throughput. A sharded, permissioned, distributed ledger may be made up of multiple shards, each of which may also be a distributed ledger and which may operate in parallel. Participation within a sharded, permissioned, distributed ledger may be allowed only with permission of an authority. A sharded, permissioned, distributed ledger may include a plurality of nodes, each including a dispatcher configured to receive transaction requests from clients and to forward received requests to verifiers configured to append transactions to individual ones of the shards.