Dioxide: A Proof-of-Stake Blockchain Consensus on Asynchronous Consensus Zones

Abstract

Blockchain is a distributed and decentralized ledger for recording transactions. Although blockchain has the advantages of transparency, decentralization, and immutability, it also faces low scalability. Recently, sharding has been emerged as an elegant solution to overcome the scalability problem in blockchain, where Asynchronous Consensus Zones itself has been shown to be a state-of-the-art sharding protocol. However, this protocol will generate a relatively high orphan rate when the throughput is high, which leads to block waste. In this paper, to avoid orphan blocks and further improve throughput, we design a sharding consensus protocol with a fixed block interval named Dioxide. We implement the protocol prototype in a simulated environment and evaluate the performance of the sharding protocol. Compared with Asynchronous Consensus Zones, our experiments show that average throughput is increased by approximately 9%.