<p>Blockchain has been a significant driver of changes in how cryptocurrencies are conceptualized despite being well-known for the scalability problems, such systems face in terms of the time and cost that it takes to carry out a transaction. While sharding enhances blockchain scalability, cross-shard transactions significantly compromise its effectiveness. Shard reconfiguration can reduce the generation of cross-shard transactions in traditional sharding systems, where the transactions related to the accounts are locked or semi-locked during the reconfiguration process, lengthening the transaction confirmation latency, thus jeopardizing the performance of blockchain sharding. To this end, we propose a transaction-released shard reconfiguration protocol, N-Lock. First, we unlock the account-related transactions (including payer transactions and payee transactions) during reconfiguration, refreshing the account state in the target shard when the reconfiguration is complete. A description of waiting transactions and possible atomicity problems within the proposed method is added to ensure system security. Moreover, to address the latency problem generated by a large number of message validations and queries during the account migration process, a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof to avoid query operations is introduced. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that N-Lock has better transaction processing capability than existing shard reconfiguration methods. With eight shards, 32 nodes, and 300,000 transactions, the proposed work’s throughput is 17% higher than other existing methods, with the message verification latency reduced by 79%.</p>