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Sharding

To become an unlimited decentralized network, Archethic Blockchain is using a feature call Sharding uses to split processing and storage power to ensure a scalable system.

Thanks to the Transaction Chain paradigm, transactions can be divided into chain, to ensure a concurrent processing as the opposite of traditional blockchains.

Other new blockchain networks start to use Sharding but sometimes not in a complete form:

  • either storage
  • either validation

Archethic Blockchain supports a complete sharding scheme for validation and for storage.

Validation​

Each transaction is validated by a new set of rotating nodes.

This ensures the distribution of validation and the processing, to achieve a linear scalability and a high TPS.

Because transaction are using the UTXO model, there is no reality out of the transaction, so the network is not subject to issue like:

  • cross shards synchronization
  • state channels communication

To get the state of a transaction, only the transaction and the transaction inputs will be taken into consideration

Storage​

After the validation of the transaction, validation nodes will be in charge to send the transaction to several pools of nodes:

  • Transaction Chain Storage Pool: All the transaction associated with the same chain must be replicated on the storage nodes associated with the new transaction's address.
  • I/O Storage Pool: Each validated transaction is replicated on the storage nodes associated with the addresses of the transaction input/outputs:
    • Transaction movements addresses storage pools
    • Node movements public key storage pools
    • Recipients addresses storage pools
  • Beacon Storage Pool: Each transaction address must be replicated on the storage nodes of the associated address subset See BeaconChain

For each transaction, the Transaction Chain Storage Pool will change, assuring a completed distribution of nodes and the data replication. Nevertheless, nothing prevents the storage nodes to overlap within the chain.

Rotating Election​

Like the validation nodes election, the storage nodes election is subject to a rotating election. In other terms, each transaction will have its own shard and storage nodes.

The storage node election is based on:

  • the address of the transaction
  • the storage nonce: a stable secret known by the network
  • the list of nodes

This permits any node to perform this computation autonomously to reproduce this list and to request a transaction from the closest node.

To ensure the best availability of the data, this list is refined by some criteria, such as:

  • P2P availability
  • Geographical distribution
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