HyperChain: A Dynamic State Sharding Protocol Supporting Smart Contracts to Achieve Low Cross-Shard and Scalability

Blockchain, a widely utilized distributed ledger technology, faces the scalability challenge. State sharding has emerged as a promising solution for addressing this challenge. However, conventional state allocation solutions often face two major obstacles: a high ratio of cross-shard transactions and an unbalanced workload distribution, due to their reliance on a simple and fixed assignment of states to shards. The former increases the overall workload on the system, while the latter reduces resource utilization. Both factors significantly impact system performance. Moreover, our key observation is that the collection of smart contract transactions can be represented as a hypergraph network by analyzing their characteristics. Therefore, this study proposes HyperChain, a novel dynamic state sharding protocol that integrates a hypergraph partition algorithm. HyperChain aims to reduce the ratio of cross-shard transactions and balance workload distribution, thereby achieving improved throughput and reduced transaction latency in smart contract blockchain systems. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed HyperChain exhibits superior performance than other solutions in terms of cross-shard transaction ratio, workload balance, throughput, and transaction latency.