Ethereum Sharding technology is coming! - Vitalik Buterin has published a partial Proof-of-Concept

Search for a solution

The Etherea development team has been looking for a solution for some time now. One of those promising is the so-called sharding, which at the same time addresses the problem of the increasing size of the blockchain. A shredding protocol would, according to Vitalik, create up to 100 shards in the future - each of them roughly equally (or more) powerful than the main blockchain.

The Twitters published a partial Proof-of-Concept of this system along with an illustrative picture showing a blockchain of twelve shards.

Anyway, we recommend reading Vitalikov's post on Reddite (where you can also find Proof-of-Concept).

Sharding problems

The most important part of the system is the "fork choice rule" - a rule that will define the shadow interaction with the main blockchain. It is difficult not to increase the speed of the blockchain at the expense of safety. With sharding, each block node will not have the whole blockchain available, and transactions / smart-contracts will no longer be performed across the network at once, which increases the risk of attacks.

Vitalik promises a lot from sharding. In the future, it will increase network throughput, nodes will not have to keep their entire transaction history, and any changes to protocols will be easier to test. It will not be necessary to impose them on the entire network, one shard will suffice.

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