  Blockchain has received much attention in recent years. This immense
popularity has raised a number of concerns, scalability of blockchain systems
being a common one. In this paper, we seek to understand how Ethereum, a
well-established blockchain system, would respond to sharding. Sharding is a
prevalent technique to increase the scalability of distributed systems. To
understand how sharding would affect Ethereum, we model Ethereum blockchain as
a graph and evaluate five methods to partition the graph. We analyze the
results using three metrics: the balance among shards, the number of
transactions that would involve multiple shards, and the amount of data that
would be relocated across shards upon a repartitioning of the system.
