Efficient Execution of Arbitrarily Complex Cross-Shard Contracts for Blockchain Sharding

Sharding is a promising solution to enhance the scalability of blockchain. However, previous sharding systems adopt the lock-based cross-shard protocol to exclusively handle one-shot cross-shard transactions, leading to low-efficiency executions and unavailable calls when handling complex cross-shard contracts that introduce multi-shot cross-shard transactions to invoke multiple contracts managed by different shards.

In this paper, we aim to enable efficient execution of arbitrarily complex cross-shard contracts in blockchain sharding systems. First, we perform a calling-flow analysis on Ethereum contracts with more than 180 million real-world transactions and find that about 30% transactions invoke complex contracts. Then, motivated by the properties of these complex contracts, we propose an off-chain execution model, called ShardCon, to achieve efficient executions for complex cross-shard contracts by decoupling the contract execution from the cross-shard consensus. Next, we introduce a cross-shard contract execution engine and a contract-driven deployment rule to the overheads introduced by off-chain executions. Moreover, to adapt to the multi-chain property of a sharding system, we introduce an off-chain state atomic commit protocol. Finally, we implement a prototype and evaluate it with concrete cross-shard contracts, showing that ShardCon can achieve more than 10x increase in throughput and 2x decrease in confirmation latency than the state-of-the-art sharding systems.