SkyChain: A Deep Reinforcement Learning-Empowered Dynamic Blockchain Sharding System

To overcome the limitations on the scalability of current blockchain systems, sharding is widely considered as a promising solution that divides the network into multiple disjoint groups processing transactions in parallel to improve throughput while decreasing the overhead of communication, computation, and storage. However, most existing blockchain sharding systems adopt a static sharding policy that cannot efficiently deal with the dynamic environment in the blockchain system, i.e., joining and leaving of nodes, and malicious attack. This paper presents SkyChain, a novel dynamic sharding-based blockchain framework to achieve a good balance between performance and security without compromising scalability under the dynamic environment. We first propose an adaptive ledger protocol to guarantee that the ledgers can merge or split efficiently based on the dynamic sharding policy. Then, to optimize the sharding policy under dynamic environment with high dimensional system states, a deep reinforcement learning-based sharding approach has been proposed, the goals of which include: 1) building a framework to evaluate the blockchain sharding systems from the aspects of performance and security; 2) adjusting the re-sharding interval, shard number and block size to maintain a long-term balance of the system’s performance and security. Experimental results show that SkyChain can effectively improve the performance and security of the sharding system without compromising scalability under the dynamic environment in the blockchain system.