Blockchain Scalability: Solutions, Challenges and Future Possibilities

In recent years, blockchain has received a lot of interest and has also been widely adopted. Yet, blockchain scalability is proving to be a difficult problem. To create a new node in platforms like Bitcoin takes few days of time. This scalability problem has few proposed solutions. The present alternatives to blockchain scalability are divided into two groups in this paper: first layer and second layer techniques. Second layer solutions suggest procedures that are deployed outside of the blockchain, while first layer methods propose adjustments to the blockchain (i.e., altering the blockchain design, such as block size). We concentrate on sharding as a viable first-layer solution to the scalability problem. The thought behind sharding is to split the blockchain network into numerous groups, each processing a different set of transactions. Furthermore, we compare few of the already available sharding-based blockchain solutions and present a performance-based comparative analysis in form of the benefits and drawbacks of the existing solutions.