In this post, we are going to check How Does Ethereum Sharding Works. This is one of the section of the previously released Ethereum Coin Guide.
Introduction
Every blockchain has it's own means of scaling the platform load in order to improve it's performance. This process makes use of the sharding concept in blockchain. Ethereum has support for sharding in order to balance it's infrastructure load.
Let's check out what is sharding and how does it solves problem of Ethereum.
What is Sharding?
When blockchain network is split into multiple distributed parts, the process is called sharding. Each shard has to maintain it's own load and the state which helps in scaling the performance of the blockchain. It is one of the complex scaling solutions for the blockchain. By making use of the sharding solution ethereum makes sure that it can achieve it's scaling goals and improve the performance.
What Problems does Sharding solves?
Ethereum has plenty of data on it's own main chain and the number of layer 2 solutions. And this data continues to increase every minute. Which in turns increases the load on the existing amount of the nodes. Which in turns affect the performance and scalability of the blockchain.
When the sharding is deployed on the chain, it makes running the nodes easier for the validators. By sharding the blockchain more nodes can be created to support the increase in the blockchain data. This is pretty much common practice among the distributed computing solutions.
What are some of the issues of Sharding?
Sharding does work wonders in theory. However it can open the ETH to number of problems. For example, single shard attack can make it possible for single shard to dominate the transaction and submit invalid series of transactions.So security is one of the issue that current sharing solution needs to solve.
Sharding is also harder to implement on Ethereum like partial proof of work chain. So unless the chain completely becomes proof of stake, it would harder to resolve some of the sharing issues.
Does Ethereum 2.0 have Sharding?
Ethereum does have the support for sharding yet how much of it would be implemented in ETH 2.0 is not yet revealed. There are some of the issues with current implementation of the sharding in ethereum. There are minimum number of nodes required for the process and so there are upside and downside to current sharding solution. As the blockchain updates itself the sharing process too will likely be going through upgrades to handle future issues. It is speculated that later stages of the ETH 2.0 would be having more proof of stake nodes which would be supporting the shards.
Conclusion
Ethereum 2.0 is likely to introduce the sharding. However how much of sharding is going to help the final outcome is yet to be tested. There are some issues both on security standpoint and performance which needs to be tested before sharding goes live on the mainnet. In near future we would be able to see Ethereum in POS (proof of stake) consensus which would make it easier for running sharding solution on Ethereum.
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Thanks for the information.i don't know about this sharding until now I read your post.thanks
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I hope Ethereum can escalate in time, otherwise it will lose its popularity.
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Excellent content Esmee!
Really happy to see this type of content earning the LEO rewards that it deserves.
Keep up the great work.
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Thank you much appreciated :)