GriDB: Scaling Blockchain Database via Sharding and Off-Chain Cross-Shard Mechanism

Blockchain databases have attracted widespread attention but suffer from poor scalability due to underlying non-scalable blockchains. While blockchain sharding is necessary for a scalable blockchain database, it poses a new challenge named on-chain cross-shard database services. Each cross-shard database service (e.g., cross-shard queries or inter-shard load balancing) involves massive cross-shard data exchanges, while the existing cross-shard mechanisms need to process each cross-shard data exchange via the consensus of all nodes in the related shards (i.e., on-chain) to resist a Byzantine environment of blockchain, which eliminates sharding benefits.

To tackle the challenge, this paper presents GriDB, the first scalable blockchain database, by designing a novel off-chain cross-shard mechanism for efficient cross-shard database services. Borrowing the idea of off-chain payments, GriDB delegates massive cross-shard data exchange to a few nodes, each of which is randomly picked from a different shard. Considering the Byzantine environment, the untrusted delegates cooperate to generate succinct proof for cross-shard data exchanges, while the consensus is only responsible for the low-cost proof verification. However, different from payments, the database services' verification has more requirements (e.g., completeness, correctness, freshness, and availability); thus, we introduce several new authenticated data structures (ADS). Particularly, we utilize consensus to extend the threat model and reduce the complexity of traditional accumulator-based ADS for verifiable cross-shard queries with a rich set of relational operators. Moreover, we study the necessity of inter-shard load balancing for a scalable blockchain database and design an off-chain and live approach for both efficiency and availability during balancing. An evaluation of our prototype shows the performance of GriDB in terms of scalability in workloads with queries and updates.