# BrokerChain: A Blockchain Sharding Protocol by Exploiting Broker Accounts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.07202 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07202/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Dec 2024.

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

- [Blockchain Infrastructure for Intelligent Cyber--Physical--Social Systems:Post-Quantum Security, Interoperability, and Trustworthy Data Economies in the Era of Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06895/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

State-of-the-art blockchain sharding solutions such as Monoxide, can cause severely imbalanced distribution of transaction (TX) workloads across all blockchain shards due to the deployment policy of their accounts. Imbalanced TX distributions then produce hot shards, in which the cross-shard TXs may experience an unlimited confirmation latency. Thus, how to address the hot-shard issue and how to reduce crossshard TXs become significant challenges of blockchain sharding. Through reviewing the related studies, we find that a crossshard TX protocol that can achieve workload balance among all shards and simultaneously reduce the quantity of crossshard TXs is still absent from the literature. To this end, we propose BrokerChain, which is a cross-shard blockchain protocol dedicated to account-based state sharding. Essentially, BrokerChain exploits fine-grained state partition and account segmentation. We also elaborate on how BrokerChain handles cross-shard TXs through broker accounts. The security issues and other properties of BrokerChain are analyzed rigorously. Finally, we conduct comprehensive evaluations using an opensource blockchain sharding prototype named BlockEmulator. The evaluation results show that BrokerChain outperforms other baselines in terms of transaction throughput, transaction confirmation latency, the queue size of the transaction pool, and workload balance.