Nightshade: Near Protocol Sharding Design [pdf] (nearprotocol.com)

FYI: found a pretty neat paper describes a new sharding design for proof-of-stake blockchains

I think the company that's building it just announced or opened up a beta program too

The fishermans' drawing is a nice touch

I'm the first author of the paper, happy to answer any questions

Nightshade specifics start on page 21 (section 3). The first bit is just an intro on sharding.

I've learned a lot from Alex just by working through these diagrams with him. Brilliant thinking that I hope will remove some of the current barriers in blockchain.

Handling the speed and validation trade off

off topic: Regarding Figure 8: "a graph with 10 nodes, each having 4 neighbors and no two shards requiring more than 2 hops for cross-shard communication". This can be achieved with only 3 neighbors (Petersen graph) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petersen_graph

More about this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_the_largest_known_gra...