Polaris

Polaris — the first sharding based public blockchain protocol for permission-less blockchains tolerating a constant fraction of byzantine network nodes. It can achieve full communication, computation, and storage overhead of all processing transactions. The key idea in Polaris approach is to partition the network into smaller committees, each of which processes a disjoint set of transactions (or a “shard").

PROS:

• Polaris exhibits almost linear scalability with computation capacity and does not require a quadratic number of messages as the network grows.
• Polaris key advantage is in using computational power to tune the parallelization of the network, yet detaining security on bounded computational assumption.Polaris protocol makes the same assumptions as those implied in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies it also provides security proofs for key invariants in its protocol.
• Polaris’s clean-slate design decouples the consensus from block-data broadcasts, hence the bandwidth spent by each node remains almost constant, regardless of the size of the network.
• Polaris is related to other sharding protocols in distributed databases, e.g., Google’s Spanner, Scatter, RSCoin. However, these sharding protocols consider a different model which does not handle byzantine failures, make assumptions of PKI systems and a trusted infrastructure and access to external random seed.
• Polaris is secure and cost-efficient even with byzantine adversaries, allowing the transaction throughput to scale up almost linearly with the network computation capacity.

CONS:

• Project white paper may be difficult for perception by an unfamiliar user. Besides, there is no information about ICO details, Polaris token, project team, and roadmap. Furthermore, a whitepaper is available only in English.
• Polaris is related to other sharding protocols in distributed databases, e.g., Google’s Spanner, Scatter, RSCoin so there is a strong competition in this sector.
• Building a scalable blockchain is an active problem in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency community.

SUGGESTIONS:

• Develop the project, its products and services in order to be competitive in the modern market.
• Rewrite the whitepaper to make it more understandable and informative.

NOTE:

Polaris increases the blockchain’s transaction throughput almost linearly with the computational power of the network. It is said to be the first secure sharding protocol for open blockchains that tolerates byzantine adversaries.