Sharding

Sharding is a technique cryptoassets employ to improve their scalability by increasing the efficiency of transaction processing and storage on their blockchains. 

It works by taking large chunks of transaction data and partitioning them up into smaller groups to be processed simultaneously. Distributing the work load horizontally across the networks nodes.

Instead of all nodes processing all transactions. Nodes take a partition(shard) of the current transaction data pending confirmation and process it independently from the rest of the network.

Once confirmed, a node stores this transaction history independently. So instead of needing to maintain the networks entire transaction history. Nodes only store the transactions from shards they confirm.

Sharding has the potential to make blockchain networks more accessible. If nodes only need to store a subset of the blockchains history to operate. Devices like mobile phones become feasible to set up nodes on vs. the computing power required to run full nodes on traditional blockchains.

Blockchain protocols implementing sharding randomly assign shards to nodes to process. Ensuring nodes are periodically broken up and cannot reliably coordinate malicious activities with a defined group of peers for an extended period of time.

Further Reading Sharding

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