Solving Blockchain’s Scalability Issues Through Sharding

While the Blockchain was initially brought forward back in 2009 when Bitcoin’s Whitepaper saw daylight, the retail investor and the common person have yet to understand its true capabilities and potential. 2017 was year of a rampant increase in the price of all cryptocurrencies, which turned the eyes of the world towards this innovative new technology. Yet, being in a fairly nascent stage, it’s not without issues and it needs further improvements.

Powerful Yet Not Entirely Scalable

The innovative Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), more commonly referred to as the Blockchain, has already revealed a number of its prominent advantages.

Right off the bat, it’s completely immutable, decentralized, peer-to-peer, and efficient. By eliminating the need for a middleman, it substantially reduces transaction costs. It presents security which is unmatched by existing conventional networks. A simple example of this is Visa’s crash in June. One of the world’s largest payments solutions provider had its network shut down for a few hours, during which millions of people were essentially unbanked. On the other hand, Bitcoin’s network has never crashed — it boasts 99.99% uptime since it was initially brought up.

This goes on to show the capabilities of the Blockchain. And of course, they don’t stop there. It allows companies to effectively digitize their processes, streamlining capabilities by taking advantage of the security, immutability, and efficiency of the blockchain.

It’s no wonder that prominent corporations such as Microsoft, Facebook, LG, Oracle, Amazon, and others, are exploring blockchain’s capabilities and even implementing it in some of their operations.

However, as any new technology, DLT also has its flaws. Namely — limited scalability.

The Scalability Problem

The blockchain was initially intended to deliver three main properties:

• Decentralization
• Security
• Scalability

Unfortunately, as it stands right now, most networks are structured in a way where each node has to confirm every single transaction, severely limiting the throughput of the entire chain. As such, the number of transactions is drastically crippled — something, which prevents networks from delivering the necessary scalability.

If blockchain is to become a technology which is fully integrated within our day-to-day lives and all of their aspects (much like the Internet, for instance), the scalability issue needs to be handled. But as it is, Ethereum’s network handles up to 15 transactions per second (TPS), EOS handles up to 6,000 TPS, Ripple — up to 1,500 TPS, Bitcoin — no more than 6 TPS, and so forth.

The world’s largest networks are widely inefficient when it comes to their ability to scale. This is something which is inevitably going to render them more or less obsolete or at least not as widely usable.

Introducing the Solution

The Power is an innovation in the field of blockchain — a project, which has already succeeded in solving one the field’s biggest issues. It introduces a network which is capable of carrying out more than 100,000 transactions per second through real-time automated sharding.

Blockchain sharding is a concept where the entire state of the network is split into separate partitions which are called “shards”. Each of these shards contains its very own piece of state as well as transaction history.

What this achieves is that instead of each node having to validate each transaction, certain nodes would only process certain transactions. This would allow for a much higher bandwidth across the entire network as it is much more efficient than having the only one mainchain like Ethereum has or sidechains like in EOS model.

Think of sharding as a tier-one network improvement. It shreds the network in independent chains also known as subchains or shards, which work to improve the throughput of the Power_network.

Why Does it Matter?

If Blockchain is to become an integrated technology which we use in our day-to-day live, it needs to be able to handle the necessary output of transactions. In light of the above example with Visa, its system is currently capable of handling about 24,000 transactions per second, and it’s not the only payment processing provider out there. Despite that fact, it still heavily outperforms every single existing chain.

All of them but one — The Power’s.

By being able to support over 100,000 successfully tested transactions per second, The Power is currently the only existing blockchain which is capable of enabling real-world integration of the technology without the fear of failure.

It provides new blockchain startups, as well as already existing ones, with an underlying technology where scalability is not an issue — something never before seen.

Useful resources:

• Landing page: thepower.io
• Power_API: thepower.io/api