Innovative Sharding Model — Scalability Killer “Danksharding”

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CoinLucky

4 min readMar 9, 2022

Vitalik’s blockchain “Endgame” made clear his opinion on blockchain development as a whole. In order to realize decentralization, censorship resistance, and scalability at the same time, average “big block chain” such as Solana has to follow a similar structure.

https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/12/06/endgame.html

Rollups and cross-domain MEV’s network effects are driving block producers towards centralization, the trend is largely inevitable. In this case, making adjustments at the protocol level to ensure that block producers do not interfere with layer1’s security and censorship resistance shall be the best option.

This makes the Layer 2 scaling solution “Danksharding” stand out.

Danksharding is named after Dankard Feist, the Ethereum researcher who proposed it. Different from its parallel sharding model, Danksharding redesigned its system around the cross-domain MEV problem in pursuit of maximized blockchain security and decentralization.

The existing sharding model doesn’t have “PBS”, each shard and beacon chain has independent validators. The reason why it’s designed this way is that we used to believe that we could maximize censorship resistance by bringing as many validators as possible.

So what’s PBS exactly?

State of research: increasing censorship resistance of transactions under proposer/builder separation (PBS)

To put it simply, PBS is a solution that adopts proposer/block builder separation. You may want to ask: why do we need this separation?

In the current blockchain framework, usually only miners produce blocks and they can select the transactions they’d like to process. Other than this, the more complex tasks miners fulfill, the more value they can extract.

This means a miner is a block’s proposer and builder at the same time.

However, the role of builder and the role of proposer are separated in PBS: proposer collects transactions from mempool and creates a “crList”, which is essentially a list that contains the block’s transaction information. The proposer convoy the crList to a builder, then the block builder reorders the transactions in the crList as they wish to maximize MEV.

In this way, although block proposers have no say when it comes to how transactions are ordered, they can still make sure all transactions coming from mempool enter the block in a censorship-resistant manner.

Therefore, PBS essentially builds up a firewall and a market between proposers and builders. Though the whole process will become more complex, servers can work at a very low cost to run verification nodes. This is particularly critical for sophisticated servers that run at a high cost. PBS is the main contributor to this.

Dankrad integrates PBS solution into Danksharding based on this. In all the previous sharding designs, there are chances to MEV, which eventually leads to a centralization problem.

The only solution to solve this problem is through implementing PBS framework. The existence of block proposers nails the centralization problem and prevents any possible behavior to vandalize on-chain security.

Additionally, in Danksharding’s latest design, the beacon blockchain will contain all the sharding blockchains. Beacon blockchains and sharding data will be validated by a “Committee” composed of validators. In this way, transactions from the same beacon blockchain can freely access sharding data, and transactions can be synchronized between rollup and Layer1. These greatly simplify rollup structure, problems such as confirmation delay will no longer exist.

Danksharding’s core advantages:

Even simpler sharding design. The new model reduces workload by 100 times.
Proposer/ builder separation, increasing block size and reducing centralization at the same time.
The merging of shard data and beacon chain data will speed up the synchronization between layer1 and zk rollup, thereby simplifying the structure of rollup.
crLists can ensure instant transaction verification on L1 (similar to the same concept on layer2).
Cross-shard MEVs will be democratized (similar to Flashbots), and potential validator centralization issues can be prevented.

Danksharding is a new model proposed by Ethereum core researchers. It’s in a preliminary stage — optimization is needed. However, it can be seen that the sharding plan of Ethereum will move forward steadily step by step. For more industry in-depth articles, please follow our official channels.

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