The Basics of Sharding

Nowadays, an increasing number of organizations and firms have begun to adopt cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technologies they run on due to their growing uses in different business areas such as supply chain management and financial transactions.

That being said, many blockchain networks run into a certain hurdle when mass adoption begins to take place. The more computers being added to their growing decentralized networks, the slower the process becomes.

In a typical blockchain network, each and every node is responsible for storing all data, be it transaction histories or account balances (nodes, in the simplest sense, are computers keeping the network running). While this is what makes blockchain technology so secure, it also considerably lowers transaction processing as all the nodes of the network have to first agree with each other before the transaction pushes through. This problem is something that, in the long run, will not bode well for blockchain technologies should they be handling not just a couple hundred but MILLIONS of transactions in the future, which of course requires speed.

This is a particularly vital challenge to overcome for distributed ledger technologies aiming to be up to par with speedy electronic payment systems in modern society.

So how does blockchain address this scaling issue? This is where sharding comes into the picture.

Sharding is the process of dynamically splitting the nodes of an entire blockchain network into smaller partitions called “shards.” Each shard contains its own data which makes it unique from other shards of the network. With this method, information is only processed and stored in only the nodes of one shard instead of having all the nodes of the network being a part of the transaction, leading to faster processing times for the entire blockchain network. Each shard and its data can still be shared amongst other shards in the network, keeping blockchain technology’s most important feature intact, a distributed ledger where all users are freely able to see transactions happening on the ledger.

Certain blockchain companies such as NEAR Protocol are one of the first few to address the scalability issue through sharding. NEAR uses this approach to continuously scale its network as demand increases.

Want to know more about NEAR Protocol’s sharded, proof-of-stake, layer-one blockchain?

Learn more here at https://near.org/learn/