Erasure‐Coded Sharding and Proof‐of‐Storage for Practical Blockchain Trilemma Balance

ABSTRACT

The simultaneous achievement of scalability, security and decentralisation remains an open problem for distributed ledger technologies. This paper introduces InternxtChain, a novel framework leveraging Internxt's decentralised storage infrastructure with zero‐knowledge proofs (ZKPs) and sharded proof‐of‐storage (SPoS) consensus. Specifically, erasure‐coded sharding ensures data availability and fault tolerance by splitting files into encoded fragments distributed across nodes; BLS‐381 aggregated signatures enable efficient consensus by compressing multiple signatures into a single short proof; and zk‐SNARK audits provide tamper‐evident storage verification without revealing user data. InternxtChain addresses this challenge through three synergistic mechanisms: (i) erasure‐coded sharding with (6,3) Reed–Solomon encoding, (ii) zk‐SNARKs for storage auditability and (iii) an SPoS consensus based on BLS‐381 aggregated signatures. Experimental evaluation on a testbed of 2048 nodes across 16 geographic regions shows that InternxtChain processes 2800 transactions per second (TPS) with a median latency of 420 ms, while maintaining 99.9% data integrity under up to 30% Byzantine nodes. These results establish a practical path toward harmonising Web3 principles with real‐world throughput, cost and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) auditability requirements.