A Community-based Strategy for Blockchain Sharding: Enabling More Budget-friendly Transactions

The promise of blockchain networks is occasionally overshadowed by challenges related to scalability and the escalation of gas fees. A significant portion of these gas fees arises from processing invalid or zero-value transactions, which imposes unnecessary costs and diminishes the technology’s intrinsic value. Sharding, which segments a blockchain into smaller, efficient shards, offers a solution, but determining the most effective partitioning is non-trivial. This paper unveils an innovative, budget-friendly approach to sharding by leveraging community detection algorithms. By clustering tightly-knit transactional communities, our method encourages more intrashard transactions, thus minimizing the higher fees associated with cross-shard transactions. As our experiments demonstrate, the result is a significant 50% reduction in transaction fees. Adopting community detection in the sharding process enhances blockchain scalability and creates a more budget-friendly ecosystem, ensuring users derive maximum value from every transaction.