An improved blockchain implementation that reduces application transaction processing bottlenecks for applications that operate on a decentralized network is described herein. For example, if an application operating on a decentralized network becomes sufficiently popular, an existing blockchain can be split into the original blockchain and an application-specific chain (or app chain) that includes blocks that only store transactions for the sufficiently popular application. Multiple application-specific chains can be formed as different applications become sufficiently popular. The original blockchain may be used to perform sortitions to select which miners should mine new blocks in the application-specific chain(s).