What Is a Shard Chain?
Sharding is a process commonly used in computer science to split a database and distribute the workload horizontally.
In the world of cryptocurrencies, specifically in Ethereum, sharding is employed to reduce network congestion and increase transactions per second by creating new shard chains.
Ethereum’s Scalability Solution
In Ethereum, sharding involves dividing the entire network into multiple portions or shards.
Each shard contains its independent states, including unique sets of account balances and smart contracts.
Sharding is a complex solution implemented within Ethereum to address scalability.
It is important to note that information stored within a shard can still be shared across other nodes, maintaining decentralization and security.
All ledger entries remain visible to everyone, but the shards themselves do not process or store all of the information.
Decentralized Scaling Strategy
In essence, sharding offers a decentralized scaling approach as an alternative to scaling up by increasing the size of the existing database.
This eliminates the need for network validators to possess more powerful and expensive computers, which would be required if the entire network had to be stored.
With shard chains, validators only need to store and process data specific to the shard they are validating, resulting in significantly faster speeds and reduced hardware requirements.