Will Phore Sharding Compromise Security for speed? An Overview of How Phore Intends to Implement ETH 2.0 Sharding (Part 1)
With the increase in the need for cryptocurrencies to hit the mainstream adoption one of the topics of major concern has always been the issue of scalability. While it is important to note that blockchain has provided endless possibilities in the world of finance with its decentralised transaction governance, we see that there is no central authority in the picture. Immutability of records, lower transaction fee, security based on cryptography and a number of other advantages have been hailed as areas of strength over the traditional financial system we see today.
The major bottleneck for mass adoption
Although all of these other factors have been seen to be of great relevance to the financial sector, scalability still remains a major bottleneck slowing the rate of acceptance on a massive scale. Considering the fact that financial service providers such as Visa already possess the ability to carry out transaction speed as much as over 20,000 tx/s. It would be understandable to see why lower transaction speeds from cryptocurrencies with the major market capitalisation such as Bitcoin still have to take care of scalability in order to become a formidable competition.
In an effort to fix this, different implementations of Sharding have been tested by developers for the purpose of scalability, this happens to be one of the most anticipated features in the ETH 2.0 release since its announcement by its founder Vitalik Buterin.
So what exactly is Sharding?
Sharding is one of the solutions Phore and developers, as well as other developers in the space, are currently working on with the general scope of enhancing transaction throughput as well as scalability. Blockchain Sharding simply means splitting the state of the network into shards or smaller and faster partitions each with their independent state and transaction history, this increases throughput because the transaction node is distributed and only certain nodes process transactions for certain shards. Instead of the entire blockchain carrying all the weight, splitting the network into smaller working pieces not only increases speed while lowering the size of processed data, but also allows for a more decentralized system.
The challenge is to ensure that each shard is secured and capable of reconciling with the others in order to maintain a unified ledger and ensure the overall integrity of the blockchain. Developers have tackled implementation from multiple angles and produced solutions that were tied together to ensure an optimal result
Why was Sharding considered?
As of this moment, each node on the Phore blockchain must process all transactions, although this model is wonderful for security because a thorough validation process involved, it doesn’t do much for scalability as we see in the case of the Cryptokitties incident in the case of Ethereum where we see the increase in the volume of transaction leaving Ethereum to gasp for air.
The trilemma faced
Decentralisation, security and scalability are the three parameters developers have been fighting to achieve at once without compromising one for another. While the first two have been achieved successfully, developers are looking forward to using Sharding to achieve the last parameters. Sharding solutions will allow as much as hundreds of thousands of transactions to be possible. Scalability must be achieved for all the promises held by the blockchain technology to come to complete fruition
How does it work
Although the technical process of this rather complex might be difficult to grasp. The general outline is easy. Imagine a cable made up of many small wires with the main network being the cables and the Shards the smaller wires working independently to achieve the same goal, each shard will be connected to the main phore blockchain and will have nodes called collators which will be randomly selected and tasked with creating collations.
These structures describe the state of the shard and the transactions that they deal with, each of these collation has a collation header which contains signatures from at least two-third of collators to ensure validity. Headers will also have information identifying the shard that the collation belongs to as well as information regarding the state before and after any transaction collators are similar to miners on other networks. When a collation is proposed a random selection of notary nodes checks and sends it to the beacon.
The beacon is the core of the entire operation here accurately described as the heartbeat of Sharding is responsible for randomly selection of collators, keeps time and manages the flow of transactions to shards the beacon will initially have its own chain but will eventually be relocated to the blockchain ( like in the case of Ethereum), there would also be a protocol in place for cross Sharding communication. Let’s say for example jack from shard 3 wants to send 10 Phr to Jill on shard 7. Jack’s balance is reduced by 10 Phr on shard 3 and a receipt is created and stored, the transaction along with the receipt are sent to shard 7 where it is processed and Jill’s balance is increased by 10 Phr. Shard 7 records the fact that the receipt from shard 3 has been spent and it creates a new receipt to be used for transactions in the future.
The big question
Regardless of the fact that all of these have issues have been trashed in order to achieve a blockchain system that would be decentralised, secured and scalable one question remains paramount. How can the Phore team achieve scalability through Sharding without compromising security, as the vulnerability of one of the shards means that the wrong input can be made into it thereby comprising the other shards as there would have to be a synchronization of all the shards to have a perfectly distributed ledger.
All of these and more would be discussed in the second part.
For more information about Phore blockchain the following links are at your disposal.
