What Is Adaptive State Sharding?
An Adaptive state sharding technique employed by Elrond in blockchain technology combines state, transaction, and network sharding to achieve optimal performance.
By incorporating the advantages of all three types of sharding, adaptive state sharding enables parallel processing, enhances communication within shards, and improves overall system performance.
In blockchain technology, scalability has challenged specific applications such as banking, supply chain management, and big data analytics.
Adaptive State Sharding in Blockchain
To better comprehend adaptive state sharding, it is essential to understand the concept of sharding itself. Sharding involves horizontally partitioning data in a database or search engine, splitting it into smaller chunks (shards) that can be stored on different machines for horizontal scaling.
While sharding has been possible in transaction and block processing, blockchain technology and smart contracts present an actual use case where sharding can be utilized to break down transactions, blocks, and other data into smaller pieces for processing by nodes with limited resources.
Adaptive sharding is a database partitioning technique that enables horizontal scaling by automatically redistributing data across servers as the system load fluctuates.
Adaptive State Sharding
In the case of adaptive state sharding, sharding occurs at different levels. At the network level, nodes are distributed into segments.
At the transaction level, sharding enables the segmentation of transactions while retaining the entire blockchain across all nodes.
Additionally, sharding occurs at the state level, simultaneously facilitating the processing and verification of more transactions.
The dynamic nature of adaptive state sharding allows for seamless adaptation to changes in the number of nodes, ensuring the decentralization and security of the network are maintained.