arXiv subjects

Zhaokang Yin

Publications and source records attributed to Zhaokang Yin.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

BlockEmulator: An Emulator Enabling to Test Blockchain Sharding Protocols

Numerous blockchain simulators have been proposed to allow researchers to simulate mainstream blockchains. However, we have not yet found a testbed that lets researchers develop and evaluate new consensus algorithms or protocols for blockchain sharding systems. To fill this gap, we developed BlockEmulator as an experimental platform, particularly for emulating blockchain sharding mechanisms. BlockEmulator adopts a lightweight blockchain architecture so developers can focus only on implementing their new protocols or mechanisms. Using BlockEmulator's layered modules and useful programming interfaces, researchers can implement a new protocol with minimal effort. In two steps, we test BlockEmulator's functionality. First, we prove the correctness of BlockEmulator's emulation results by comparing theoretical analysis with observed experimental results. Second, other experiments show that BlockEmulator can measure a range of metrics, including throughput, transaction confirmation latency, cross-shard transaction ratio, the queuing status of transaction pools, workload distribution across blockchain shards, etc. We have made BlockEmulator open-source on GitHub.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

BrokerChain: A Blockchain Sharding Protocol by Exploiting Broker Accounts

State-of-the-art blockchain sharding solutions such as Monoxide, can cause severely imbalanced distribution of transaction (TX) workloads across all blockchain shards due to the deployment policy of their accounts. Imbalanced TX distributions then produce hot shards, in which the cross-shard TXs may experience an unlimited confirmation latency. Thus, how to address the hot-shard issue and how to reduce crossshard TXs become significant challenges of blockchain sharding. Through reviewing the related studies, we find that a crossshard TX protocol that can achieve workload balance among all shards and simultaneously reduce the quantity of crossshard TXs is still absent from the literature. To this end, we propose BrokerChain, which is a cross-shard blockchain protocol dedicated to account-based state sharding. Essentially, BrokerChain exploits fine-grained state partition and account segmentation. We also elaborate on how BrokerChain handles cross-shard TXs through broker accounts. The security issues and other properties of BrokerChain are analyzed rigorously. Finally, we conduct comprehensive evaluations using an opensource blockchain sharding prototype named BlockEmulator. The evaluation results show that BrokerChain outperforms other baselines in terms of transaction throughput, transaction confirmation latency, the queue size of the transaction pool, and workload balance.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

Economic Systems in Metaverse: Basics, State of the Art, and Challenges

Economic systems play pivotal roles in the metaverse. However, we have not yet found an overview that systematically introduces economic systems for the metaverse. Therefore, we review the state-of-the-art solutions, architectures, and systems related to economic systems. When investigating those state-of-the-art studies, we keep two questions in our mind: (1) what is the framework of economic systems in the context of the metaverse, and (2) what activities would economic systems engage in the metaverse? This article aims to disclose insights into the economic systems that work for both the current and the future metaverse. To have a clear overview of the economic-system framework, we mainly discuss the connections among three fundamental elements in the metaverse, i.e., digital creation, digital assets, and the digital trading market. After that, we elaborate on each topic of the proposed economic-system framework. Those topics include incentive mechanisms, monetary systems, digital wallets, decentralized finance (DeFi) activities, and cross-platform interoperability for the metaverse. For each topic, we mainly discuss three questions: a) the rationale of this topic, b) why the metaverse needs this topic, and c) how this topic will evolve in the metaverse. Through this overview, we wish readers can better understand what economic systems the metaverse needs, and the insights behind the economic activities in the metaverse.

cs.CY↗