CShard: Blockchain Sharding via Repairable Fountain Codes and the Paradigm for Sharding Design
Summary
CShard is a blockchain sharding (dividing transaction processing across multiple parallel groups of nodes) protocol that uses repairable fountain codes (a data encoding method that allows recovery of lost information) to prevent system failures when shards become corrupted. The protocol introduces a ghost reporter mechanism that lets all nodes verify transactions, allowing smaller shard sizes while maintaining security and enabling recovery of corrupted blocks through decoding.
Solution / Mitigation
The source describes two main technical approaches built into CShard itself: (1) Using repairable fountain codes to recover blocks of corrupted shards through decoding by corresponding shard groups, keeping the system secure and available, and (2) implementing a ghost reporter mechanism that allows all nodes to verify transactions by submitting reports, which enables detection of corrupted shards and recovery of blocks while reducing the required number of nodes per shard.
Classification
Original source: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11471667
First tracked: May 8, 2026 at 08:01 PM
Classified by LLM (prompt v3) · confidence: 95%