SecChain: A Secure Stateless Sharded Blockchain via a Novel State Commitment

Lijuan Huo, Libing Wu, Enshu Wang, Bolong Zheng, Xing Fan, Xinhai Yan, Bingyi Liu

Abstract: Sharding protocols in cryptocurrencies are dedicated to improving system throughput and reducing cross-shard transaction latency. However, they face the challenge of state explosion due to their stateful design. An intuitive solution is state sharding. Existing state sharding protocols aim to reduce the incidence of cross-shard transactions and balance transaction load. Nevertheless, it inevitably introduces the complex and sequential processing of cross-shard transactions and neglects the security of state data. To address these challenges, we propose SecChain, a secure stateless sharded blockchain via a novel state commitment in this paper. SecChain fully exploits the historical characteristics of transactions and designs the parallel cross-shard transaction execution based on asynchronous prepaid accounts. We then introduce a novel state commitment scheme to ensure the security of state data and improve the efficiency of transaction validation. In addition, we optimize the on-chain and off-chain storage by integrating an incremental partial state trie on-chain and a full trie with proofs off-chain. We perform a comprehensive evaluation using real-world workloads and results demonstrate that SecChain’s throughput is 1.75× that of BrokerChain, and its latency is reduced by 7×. Furthermore, SecChain significantly reduces both proof overhead and storage overhead.

External IDs:dblp:journals/tdsc/HuoWWZFYL26