This blockchain technology intelligently groups related transactions into the same shards to minimize cross-shard transactions and increase blockchain performance. The blockchain technology market was valued at $3.4 billion in 2020 and should reach $72 billion by 2027. Splitting a blockchain into multiple shards can vastly improve its scalability, allowing it to handle thousands of transactions per second. However, with available sharding techniques, the confirmation protocols required for cross-shard transactions, which involve data from more than one shard, significantly increase the latency and resource cost of the blockchain.
Researchers at the University of Florida have created OptChain, a blockchain-sharding technique that intelligently optimizes the placement of transactions into shards. It minimizes the number of cross-shard transactions in order to reduce confirmation time while guaranteeing high parallelism in transaction processing.
Optimized blockchain sharding to improve scalability for use in cryptocurrency, insurance, healthcare, business, smart grids, etc.
The blockchain sharding system is based on an original concept of transaction placement. An intelligent algorithm learns from past transactions in order to group related transactions into the same shards. This reduces the number of cross-shard transactions and the computational load balance among shards, allowing for a high level of parallelism for a highly scalable blockchain.
