DynaShard: Secure and Adaptive Blockchain Sharding Protocol With Hybrid Consensus and Dynamic Shard Management

Ao Liu, Jing Chen, Kun He, Ruiying Du, Jiahua Xu, Cong Wu, Yebo Feng, Teng Li, Jianfeng Ma

Abstract: Blockchain sharding has emerged as a promising solution to the scalability challenges in traditional blockchain systems by partitioning the network into smaller, manageable subsets called shards. Despite its potential, existing sharding solutions face significant limitations in handling dynamic workloads, ensuring secure cross-shard transactions, and maintaining system integrity. To address these gaps, we propose DynaShard, a dynamic and secure cross-shard transaction processing mechanism designed to enhance blockchain sharding efficiency and security. DynaShard combines adaptive shard management, a hybrid consensus approach, plus an efficient state synchronization and dispute resolution protocol. Our performance evaluation, conducted using a robust experimental setup with real-world network conditions and transaction workloads, demonstrates DynaShard's superior throughput, reduced latency, and improved shard utilization compared to the fast transaction scheduling in blockchain sharding (FTSBS) method. Specifically, DynaShard achieves up to a 42.6% reduction in latency and a 78.77% improvement in shard utilization under high transaction volumes and varying cross-shard transaction ratios. These results highlight DynaShard's ability to outperform state-of-the-art sharding methods, ensuring scalable and resilient blockchain systems. We believe that DynaShard's innovative approach will significantly impact future developments in blockchain technology, paving the way for more efficient and secure distributed systems.