SLChain: A secure and low‐storage pressure sharding blockchain

Abstract As a distributed ledger technology, blockchain's low throughput is challenging to support large‐scale applications. Sharding is one way to solve this problem, but the security of existing sharded blockchains is not enough. In addition, with the increase of time, the node storage pressure in the shard will also increase. Therefore, SLChain was proposed as a secure and low storage pressure sharding blockchain. SLChain works together between shards for block validation to avoid inconsistencies caused by a single shard being controlled by adversaries. As well as by relying on a reputation‐established confirmation committee that allows blocks to be confirmed quickly and without forking. In addition, a secure ledger pruning mechanism is designed to make the space required for nodes grow very slowly over time, reducing the storage pressure on nodes. The results show that SLChain can improve security and throughput, and the node storage pressure is small.