{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]],"date-time":"2026-03-14T17:59:28Z","timestamp":1773511168168,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":76,"publisher":"Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)","issue":"7","content-domain":{"domain":["dl.acm.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Proc. VLDB Endow."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2025,3]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>Sharding enhances blockchain scalability by dividing nodes into multiple shards to handle transactions in parallel. However, a size-security dilemma where every shard must be large enough to ensure its security constrains the efficacy of individual shards and the degree of sharding. Most existing solutions therefore rely on either weakening the adversary or making stronger network assumptions.<\/jats:p>\n          <jats:p>This paper presents Arete, an optimally scalable blockchain sharding protocol designed to resolve the dilemma based on an observation that if individual shards can tolerate a higher fraction of Byzantine faults, we can securely create smaller shards in a larger quantity. The key idea of Arete, therefore, is to improve the security resilience of shards by dividing the blockchain's State Machine Replication (SMR) process. Like modern blockchains, Arete first decouples SMR in three steps: transaction dissemination, ordering, and execution. However, for Arete, a single ordering shard performs the ordering task while multiple processing shards perform the dissemination and execution of blocks. As processing shards do not run consensus, each of those tolerates up to half compromised nodes. Moreover, the SMR process in the ordering shard is extremely lightweight as it only operates on the block digests. Second, Arete considers safety and liveness against Byzantine failures separately to improve the safety threshold further while tolerating temporary liveness violations in a controlled manner. Apart from creating more optimal-size shards, such a deconstructed SMR scheme empowers us to devise a novel certify-order-execute architecture to fully parallelize transaction handling, thereby significantly improving the performance. We implement Arete and evaluate it on the AWS environment by running up to 500 nodes. Our results demonstrate that Arete outperforms representative sharding protocols in scalability, throughput, and cross-shard latency without compromising on intra-shard latency.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.14778\/3734839.3734855","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,29]],"date-time":"2025-08-29T16:01:06Z","timestamp":1756483266000},"page":"2198-2211","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":3,"title":["Optimal Sharding for Scalable Blockchains with Deconstructed SMR"],"prefix":"10.14778","volume":"18","author":[{"given":"Jianting","family":"Zhang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Purdue University"}]},{"given":"Zhongtang","family":"Luo","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Purdue University"}]},{"given":"Raghavendra","family":"Ramesh","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Supra Research"}]},{"given":"Aniket","family":"Kate","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Purdue University, Supra Research"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,29]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/SP40000.2020.00044"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_2_1","volume-title":"Chainspace: A sharded smart contracts platform. arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.03778","author":"Al-Bassam Mustafa","year":"2017","unstructured":"Mustafa Al-Bassam, Alberto Sonnino, Shehar Bano, Dave Hrycyszyn, and George Danezis. 2017. Chainspace: A sharded smart contracts platform. arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.03778 (2017)."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_3_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/Blockchain.2019.00044"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_4_1","volume-title":"2019 IEEE 39th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS). IEEE, 1337\u20131347","author":"Amiri Mohammad Javad","year":"2019","unstructured":"Mohammad Javad Amiri, Divyakant Agrawal, and Amr El Abbadi. 2019. Par-blockchain: Leveraging transaction parallelism in permissioned blockchain systems. In 2019 IEEE 39th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS). IEEE, 1337\u20131347."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_5_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3448016.3452807"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_6_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3190508.3190538"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_7_1","volume-title":"https:\/\/aptos.dev\/en\/network\/blockchain\/move. Accessed","author":"AptosMove","year":"2024","unstructured":"Aptos. [n.d.]. AptosMove VM. https:\/\/aptos.dev\/en\/network\/blockchain\/move. Accessed: 2024."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_8_1","volume-title":"High Throughput DAG BFT Can Be Fast! arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.20488","author":"Arun Balaji","year":"2024","unstructured":"Balaji Arun, Zekun Li, Florian Suri-Payer, Sourav Das, and Alexander Spiegelman. 2024. Shoal++: High Throughput DAG BFT Can Be Fast! arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.20488 (2024)."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_9_1","volume-title":"four nines scenario. https:\/\/docs.aws.amazon.com\/wellarchitected\/latest\/reliability-pillar\/s-99.99-scenario.html. Accessed","author":"AWS.","year":"2024","unstructured":"AWS. [n.d.]. four nines scenario. https:\/\/docs.aws.amazon.com\/wellarchitected\/latest\/reliability-pillar\/s-99.99-scenario.html. Accessed: 2024."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_10_1","volume-title":"Mysticeti: Low-Latency DAG Consensus with Fast Commit Path. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.14821","author":"Babel Kushal","year":"2023","unstructured":"Kushal Babel, Andrey Chursin, George Danezis, Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias, and Alberto Sonnino. 2023. Mysticeti: Low-Latency DAG Consensus with Fast Commit Path. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.14821 (2023)."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_11_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3319535.3363213"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_12_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3419614.3423249"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_13_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Same Blackshear Andrey Chursin George Danezis Anastasios Kichidis Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias Xun Li Mark Logan Ashok Menon Todd Nowacki Alberto Sonnino et al. 2023. Sui lutris: A blockchain combining broadcast and consensus. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.18042 (2023).","DOI":"10.1145\/3658644.3670286"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_14_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3419614.3423256"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_15_1","volume-title":"Seth Gilbert, Vincent Gramoli, Rachid Guerraoui, Jovan Komatovic, and Manuel Vidigueira.","author":"Civit Pierre","year":"2024","unstructured":"Pierre Civit, Muhammad Ayaz Dzulfikar, Seth Gilbert, Vincent Gramoli, Rachid Guerraoui, Jovan Komatovic, and Manuel Vidigueira. 2024. Byzantine consensus is (n2): the Dolev-Reischuk bound is tight even in partial synchrony! Distributed Comput. 37, 2 (2024), 89\u2013119."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_16_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2332432.2332490"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_17_1","volume-title":"Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange. https:\/\/www.coinbase.com\/. Accessed","year":"2024","unstructured":"Coinbase. [n.d.]. Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange. https:\/\/www.coinbase.com\/. Accessed: 2024."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_18_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/SP40001.2021.00087"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_19_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3492321.3519594"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_20_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3299869.3319889"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_21_1","volume-title":"Efficient cross-shard transaction execution in sharded blockchains. arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.14521","author":"Das Sourav","year":"2020","unstructured":"Sourav Das, Vinith Krishnan, and Ling Ren. 2020. Efficient cross-shard transaction execution in sharded blockchains. arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.14521 (2020)."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_22_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3548606.3559375"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_23_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3627703.3650073"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_24_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/42282.42283"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_25_1","volume-title":"Ethereum Synchronization Modes. https:\/\/ethereum.org\/en\/developers\/docs\/nodes-and-clients\/#sync-modes. Accessed","year":"2024","unstructured":"Ethereum. [n.d.]. Ethereum Synchronization Modes. https:\/\/ethereum.org\/en\/developers\/docs\/nodes-and-clients\/#sync-modes. Accessed: 2024."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_26_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3149.214121"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_27_1","volume-title":"Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). https:\/\/ethereum.org\/en\/developers\/docs\/evm\/. Accessed","author":"Fundation Ethereum","year":"2024","unstructured":"Ethereum Fundation. [n.d.]. Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). https:\/\/ethereum.org\/en\/developers\/docs\/evm\/. Accessed: 2024."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_28_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-031-18283-9_14"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_29_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3572848.3577524"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_30_1","volume-title":"Motorway: Seamless high speed BFT. arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.10369","author":"Giridharan Neil","year":"2024","unstructured":"Neil Giridharan, Florian Suri-Payer, Ittai Abraham, Lorenzo Alvisi, and Natacha Crooks. 2024. Motorway: Seamless high speed BFT. arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.10369 (2024)."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_31_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3448016.3457294"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_32_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.14778\/3476249.3476275"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_33_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/INFOCOM42981.2021.9488747"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_34_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/INFOCOM53939.2023.10228939"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_35_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/INFOCOM48880.2022.9796859"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_36_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621394"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_37_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3465084.3467905"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_38_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/SP.2018.000-5"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_39_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3479722.3480989"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_40_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/INFOCOM53939.2023.10228892"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_41_1","volume-title":"Siow Mong Rick Goh, and Jin Zhang","author":"Lin You","year":"2024","unstructured":"You Lin, Mingzhe Li, Qingsong Wei, Yong Liu, Siow Mong Rick Goh, and Jin Zhang. 2024. DL-Chain: Scalable and Stable Blockchain Sharding with High Concurrency via Dual-Layer Consensus. arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.06882 (2024)."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_42_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/TPDS.2021.3095234"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_43_1","volume-title":"Kronos: A secure and generic sharding blockchain consensus with optimized overhead. Cryptology ePrint Archive","author":"Liu Yizhong","year":"2024","unstructured":"Yizhong Liu, Andi Liu, Yuan Lu, Zhuocheng Pan, Yinuo Li, Jianwei Liu, Song Bian, and Mauro Conti. 2024. Kronos: A secure and generic sharding blockchain consensus with optimized overhead. Cryptology ePrint Archive (2024)."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_44_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2976749.2978389"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_45_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3319535.3354225"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_46_1","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. 1686\u20131699","author":"Momose Atsuki","unstructured":"Atsuki Momose and Ling Ren.2021. Multi-threshold byzantine fault tolerance. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. 1686\u20131699."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_47_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3590140.3629111"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_48_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.14778\/3342263.3342632"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_49_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3558535.3559778"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_50_1","volume-title":"Ethereum Sync Mode. https:\/\/docs.nethermind.io\/fundamentals\/sync\/. Accessed","author":"Mind Nether","year":"2025","unstructured":"Nether Mind. [n.d.]. Ethereum Sync Mode. https:\/\/docs.nethermind.io\/fundamentals\/sync\/. Accessed: 2025."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_51_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/ICDCS.2019.00059"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_52_1","volume-title":"Instachain: Breaking the sharding limits via adjustable quorums. Cryptology ePrint Archive","author":"Ozdayi Mustafa Safa","year":"2022","unstructured":"Mustafa Safa Ozdayi, Yue Guo, and Mahdi Zamani. 2022. Instachain: Breaking the sharding limits via adjustable quorums. Cryptology ePrint Archive (2022)."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_53_1","volume-title":"Hybrid Consensus: Efficient Consensus in the Permissionless Model. In 31 International Symposium on Distributed Computing. 6.","author":"Pass Rafael","year":"2017","unstructured":"Rafael Pass and Elaine Shi. 2017. Hybrid Consensus: Efficient Consensus in the Permissionless Model. In 31 International Symposium on Distributed Computing. 6."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_54_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.14778\/3551793.3551816"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_55_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3453483.3454112"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_56_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3477132.3483574"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_57_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3318464.3389693"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_58_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3299869.3319883"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_59_1","volume-title":"Sailfish: Towards Improving Latency of DAG-based BFT. Cryptology ePrint Archive","author":"Shrestha Nibesh","year":"2024","unstructured":"Nibesh Shrestha, Aniket Kate, and Kartik Nayak. 2024. Sailfish: Towards Improving Latency of DAG-based BFT. Cryptology ePrint Archive (2024)."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_60_1","volume-title":"Shoal: Improving DAG-BFT Latency And Robustness. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.03058","author":"Spiegelman Alexander","year":"2023","unstructured":"Alexander Spiegelman, Balaji Aurn, Rati Gelashvili, and Zekun Li. 2023. Shoal: Improving DAG-BFT Latency And Robustness. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.03058 (2023)."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_61_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3548606.3559361"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_62_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/ICDE48307.2020.00121"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_63_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3576915.3616587"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_64_1","volume-title":"uniswap. https:\/\/docs.uniswap.io\/. Accessed","year":"2024","unstructured":"Uniswap.io. [n.d.]. uniswap. https:\/\/docs.uniswap.io\/. Accessed: 2024."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_65_1","volume-title":"16th USENIX symposium on networked systems design and implementation (NSDI 19)","author":"Wang Jiaping","year":"2019","unstructured":"Jiaping Wang and Hao Wang. 2019. Monoxide: Scale out blockchains with asynchronous consensus zones. In 16th USENIX symposium on networked systems design and implementation (NSDI 19). 95\u2013112."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_66_1","volume-title":"Pando: Extremely Scalable BFT Based on Committee Sampling. Cryptology ePrint Archive","author":"Wang Xin","year":"2024","unstructured":"Xin Wang, Haochen Wang, Haibin Zhang, and Sisi Duan. 2024. Pando: Extremely Scalable BFT Based on Committee Sampling. Cryptology ePrint Archive (2024)."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_67_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3372297.3417243"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_68_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.14722\/ndss.2024.24006"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_69_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/945445.945470"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_70_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3293611.3331591"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_71_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/SP40000.2020.00008"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_72_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3243734.3243853"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_73_1","unstructured":"Jianting Zhang. 2024. The implementation of Arete. https:\/\/github.com\/EtherCS\/arete\/."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_74_1","volume-title":"Front-running Attack in Sharded Blockchains and Fair Cross-shard Consensus. In 31st Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium. The Internet Society.","author":"Zhang Jianting","year":"2024","unstructured":"Jianting Zhang, Wuhui Chen, Sifu Luo, Tiantian Gong, Zicong Hong, and Aniket Kate. 2024. Front-running Attack in Sharded Blockchains and Fair Cross-shard Consensus. In 31st Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium. The Internet Society."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_75_1","volume-title":"Optimal Sharding for Scalable Blockchains with Deconstructed SMR. arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.08252","author":"Zhang Jianting","year":"2024","unstructured":"Jianting Zhang, Zhongtang Luo, Raghavendra Ramesh, and Aniket Kate. 2024. Optimal Sharding for Scalable Blockchains with Deconstructed SMR. arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.08252 (2024)."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_76_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/ICDE55515.2023.00390"}],"container-title":["Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/pdf\/10.14778\/3734839.3734855","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,29]],"date-time":"2025-08-29T16:01:48Z","timestamp":1756483308000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.14778\/3734839.3734855"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2025,3]]},"references-count":76,"journal-issue":{"issue":"7","published-print":{"date-parts":[[2025,3]]}},"alternative-id":["10.14778\/3734839.3734855"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.14778\/3734839.3734855","relation":{},"ISSN":["2150-8097"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2150-8097","type":"print"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2025,3]]},"assertion":[{"value":"2025-08-29","order":3,"name":"published","label":"Published","group":{"name":"publication_history","label":"Publication History"}}]}}