# Challenges and pitfalls of partitioning blockchains

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.07356 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07356/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Apr 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [TxAllo: Dynamic Transaction Allocation in Sharded Blockchain Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11584/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Blockchain has received much attention in recent years. This immense popularity has raised a number of concerns, scalability of blockchain systems being a common one. In this paper, we seek to understand how Ethereum, a well-established blockchain system, would respond to sharding. Sharding is a prevalent technique to increase the scalability of distributed systems. To understand how sharding would affect Ethereum, we model Ethereum blockchain as a graph and evaluate five methods to partition the graph. We analyze the results using three metrics: the balance among shards, the number of transactions that would involve multiple shards, and the amount of data that would be relocated across shards upon a repartitioning of the system.