DL-Chain: Scalable and Stable Blockchain Sharding with High Concurrency via Dual-Layer Consensus

Abstract: Sharding enhances blockchain scalability by partitioning nodes into multiple groups for concurrent transaction processing. Configuring a large number of \emph{small shards} helps improve the transaction concurrency of a sharding system. However, it increases the fraction of malicious nodes within each shard, easily leading to shard corruption and jeopardizing system security. Some existing works have attempted to improve concurrency by reducing the shard size while maintaining security. However, they often require frequent and time-consuming recovery of corrupted shards, leading to severe system stagnation. Also, they usually require network-wide consensus to guarantee security, which limits scalability. To address these issues, we propose DL-Chain, a blockchain sharding system that can securely provide \emph{high concurrency with stable and scalable performance.} Our core idea is a \underline{D}ual-\underline{L}ayer architecture and consensus, which consists of numerous smaller proposer shards (PSs) for transaction processing and multiple larger finalizer committees (FCs) for transaction finalization. To avoid system stagnation and thus guarantee stable performance, we ensure PSs' liveness even if they are corrupted through the cooperation of PSs and FCs, thus eliminating the recovery process of corrupted PSs. To better trade-off security and scalability, we fine-tune the FCs to enable multiple FCs to coexist securely. As a result, DL-Chain allows a larger fraction of malicious nodes in each PS ($<1/2$) and thus can securely configure smaller shards for boosted stable and scalable concurrency. Evaluation results show that DL-Chain achieves up to 10 times improvement in throughput compared to existing solutions and provides stable concurrency with up to 2,550 nodes.