Ethereum Founder All Set To Unleash ‘Sharding’

By Raghav Sawhney

Ethereum is an open source Blockchain based operating system and computed platform founded by Vitalik Buterin, a cryptocurrency researcher, in the year 2015. However, in the year 2016, due to the collapse of digital decentralized autonomous organisation project (DAO), Ethereum was divided into two separate blockchain system – Ethereum (New version) and the original one was known as Ethereum Classic (ETC).

Recently at a conference, Beyond Block Taipei on November 25, Vitalik Buterin announced the arrival of Sharding, the most anticipated scaling solution for Ethereum Blockchain. It will improve the performance of the Ethereum platform in terms of scalability and privacy.

The total number of the Ethereum transactions have increased notably in few years which has also resulted in a spike of transaction fees. Sharding includes splitting up the Blockchain system to cover up small sections which can process transactions parallelly and will also boost up the transaction capacity and throughput.

What does Sharding mean?

Sharding is a programme that aims at optimizing the process of verification of transactions and smart contracts by dividing the blockchain into different partitions known as shards. Earlier Ethereum Blockchain network used to give access to every single node to go through the whole of transaction history which was considered as a primary issue in the privacy. Now according to the concept of Sharding, it allows certain specific nodes to be assigned to certain specific shards, which will help in optimising the verification of transactions.

Minimal Sharding protocol

The integration of Sharding solution has geared up after Buterin announced the new development target Minimal Sharding protocol earlier this month.

Minimum Sharding protocol can also be known as minimal viable product in software industry was an initiative proposed by the co-founder of Ethereum which aims to improve the throughput of trade and to radically improve the scalability of the Ethereum blockchain. This protocol gives developer the freedom to build infrastructure and test them by using the Sharding solution elements.

On 29th April, Buterin published a recent update which outlined cross-linking to be the solution to compliment the imposition of the minimal Sharding protocol. This solution links the main Ethereum chain to the shard chains. These shard chains parallelly process a given percentage of transactions and link them together.

According to Buterin, in a primary shard model, linkages are also being executed in a straight-line dependency which can also delay the shard collation time whereas the chain cross-linking solution can assure that the shard collection are processed within the time duration between when the next period begins and when they are included in the main chain. The Sharding specifications is still a work in progress project.

Future of Ethereum Scalability

Sharding is still a work in progress project but the accelerated speed of updates from Buterin and the Ethereum dev community has been providing a good positive key sign that the scalability problems will be very soon solved. Apart from the latest upgrades, Buterin recently has also introduced a new fresh scaling solution for Ethereum smart contract plan Plasma in Paris at the Ethereum Community Conference on 9th March.

Together with the codes for Ethereum’s imminent consensus change from Proof of Work up to Proof of Stake is complete and been submitted as Ethereum advance proposal (EIP) 1011 or Hybrid Casper FFG, the Ethereum network is geared up for a major significant upgrade in the near future.