CycLedger: A Scalable and Secure Parallel Protocol for Distributed Ledger via Sharding
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Traditional public distributed ledgers have not been able to scale-out well and work efficiently. Sharding is deemed as a promising way to solve this problem. By partitioning all nodes into small committees and letting them work in parallel, we can significantly lower the amount of communication and computation, reduce the overhead on each node's storage, as well as enhance the throughput of distributed ledger. Existing sharding-based protocols still suffer from several serious drawbacks. The first thing is that all honest nodes must connect well with each other, which demands a huge number of communication channels in the network. Moreover, previous protocols have face great loss in efficiency in the case where the honesty of each committee's leader is in question. At the same time, no explicit incentive is provided for nodes to actively participate in the protocol. We present CycLedger, a scalable and secure parallel protocol for distributed ledger via sharding. Our protocol selects a leader and a partial set for each committee, who are in charge of maintaining intra-shard consensus and communicating with other committees, to reduce the amortized complexity of communication, computation and storage on all nodes. We introduce a novel commitment scheme between committees and a recovery procedure to prevent the system from crashing even when leaders of committees are malicious. To add incentive for the network, we use the concept of reputation, which measures each node's computing power. As nodes with higher reputation receive more rewards, there is an encouragement for nodes with strong computing ability to work honestly so as to gain reputation. In this way, we strike out a new path to establish scalability, security and incentive for the sharding-based distributed ledger.
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