AegisDB: Scalable Blockchain Database with Secure Decentralised Load Balancing

Blockchain technology offers unique properties that can benefit traditional distributed database systems, such as decentralization, tamper-proof transaction history, and Byzantine fault tolerance. However, blockchain databases also face challenges, particularly performance limitations due to scalability issues. While existing solutions such as sharding can mitigate scalability issues, they compromise the security benefits inherited from blockchains. In this paper, we investigate a novel method to improve scalability without invalidating the security assumptions of the blockchain. To achieve this, we reintroduce the classical concept of load balancing to blockchain database systems. We present the Verifiable Random Round Robin (V3R) load-balancing algorithm, and propose a blockchain database system, AegisDB, based on this algorithm. In AegisDB, workloads are distributed to the server nodes using V3R, ensuring scalability while preserving a similar level of security guarantees as unsharded blockchains.