Sharding Technology: Exploring New Ways to Scale Blockchain

The development of blockchain technology faces challenges in scalability. To address this issue, Sharding technology has emerged as one of the important methods to enhance blockchain performance and throughput. This article will explore the principles of Sharding technology, existing solutions, and future development directions, with a particular focus on the emerging Shardeum project and its innovative dynamic sharding solution.

1. Overview of Sharding Technology

Sharding is a scaling solution that divides nodes in the network into smaller groups to process different sets of transactions and achieve parallel processing. It improves the overall performance of the Blockchain by alleviating the burden of handling the large amounts of data required to aggregate across the entire network.

Sharding technology mainly involves three aspects:

1. Network Sharding: How to allocate nodes to different shards
2. Transaction Sharding: How to Allocate Transactions to the Corresponding Shards for Processing
3. State Sharding: How Blockchain Data is Stored Across Different Shards

However, sharding technology also faces some challenges, such as:

• How to ensure the security between Shardings and avoid a single Sharding being attacked
• How to handle cross-Sharding transactions to ensure the atomicity of transactions
• How to maintain the level of decentralization of the network while increasing the number of sharding

2. Existing Sharding Solutions

1. Ethereum

Ethereum plans to adopt a data availability Sharding solution, namely "Danksharding". This solution uses Sharding "Blobs" to partition data, while employing "data availability sampling" to verify the availability of all data.

2. Harmony

Harmony adopts a standard sharding method, including a beacon chain and multiple shard chains. It uses the effective proof of stake (EPoS) mechanism and secure random sharding technology to enhance security by distributing the tokens staked by large holders across multiple shards.

3. Elrond

Elrond uses adaptive state sharding, which can dynamically adjust the number of shards based on network conditions. It employs a secure proof of stake consensus mechanism and utilizes an asynchronous model to handle cross-shard transactions.

4. Near

Near proposed the "Nightshade Protocol" ( Nightshade ), modeling the system as a single Blockchain and implementing Sharding at the block level. It employs two roles: block producers and validators, to handle cross-sharding transactions through continuous execution.

3. Shardeum and Dynamic State Sharding

Shardeum has proposed two innovative solutions to address the limitations of existing Sharding technology:

1. Transaction-Level Consensus

Shardeum achieves consensus at the transaction level rather than the block level, allowing for simultaneous processing of transactions across shards. This approach enables second-level finality and low latency, effectively preventing network congestion.

2. Dynamic State Sharding

Shardeum uses dynamic state sharding, where each node can hold different address ranges, and there is overlap. This approach, while increasing complexity, allows for true linear scalability.

Through these innovations, Shardeum is expected to achieve:

• More efficient cross-Sharding transaction processing
• Linear scaling of network nodes
• More flexible resource allocation

IV. Conclusion

Sharding technology provides new possibilities for the scalability of Blockchain. Although challenges remain, innovative projects like Shardeum are advancing the technology. With more exploration and practice, we have reason to believe that sharding technology will pave the way for large-scale applications of Blockchain and promote the development of the Web3 ecosystem.