What is Polaris?
Currently the issue with cryptocurrencies is that in real world applications they are limited by the transaction speed and scalability which makes them un-realistic for mass adoption. We take a new approach to overcome these problems by breaking down processing transactions into smaller groups of nodes called shards.
Large networks require increased computational power which leads to slower transactions. By breaking down these transactions into smaller shards, it maximizes performance significantly allowing the system to scale much more efficiently.
Unfortunately, standard sharding based blockchain protocols only benefit partially from sharding due to the fact that they still require a limited amount of communication from participants per transaction.
Due to this issue, it causes the throughput and latency protocols to slow down significantly which decreases the security and limits their potential to become an everyday, mainstream payment solution.
In this paper we propose Polaris the first sharding based public blockchain protocol that can achieve full communication, computation, and storage overhead of all processing transactions without relying on any trusted setup. It is completely safe from Byzantine faults from up to 2/3 fraction of its participants.
To ensure all blocks are secure, Polaris uses a flawless intra committee consensus algorithm, that can create extremely high throughput via block pipelining, an innovative hearsay protocol for large blocks.
Our protocol uses a dynamic cross-shard transaction verification procedure to avoid hearsay across the entire network.
With all this said Polaris can process and authenticate a speed of 1,000,000 tps with confirmation latency of 4 seconds in a network of 5,000 nodes with no failure.