Vitalik Buterin Tweets “Sharding is Coming” Which Should Scale Blockchain

The Creator of the Ethereum network, Vitalik Buterin recently announced that Sharding is coming. Sharding is a simple approach, where Ethereum will be split into numerous concurrent networks. This would make network scaling more efficient.

Everything Is Almost Complete

Vitalik, who is the co-founder of Ethereum, said that all the in-house scaling solution being developed for Ethereum was almost complete. Vitalik first made the proposal for this solution at the beginning of April 2018. He advised developers to start drafting a sharding system. He said that the drafting would go on until the community had produced an exact vision of what the Sharding on Ethereum should look like.

He made the announcement on Twitter. As he made the announcement, he also shared a new repository for code. This repo will record a partial proof-of-concept for a fork choice rule. This will be the code for how the network shards will integrate with the main blockchain.

See also: my somewhat longer reddit posthttps://t.co/YQ2m7X6f4V

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) April 30, 2018

Ethereum Sharding Explained

Sharding will be an attempt to split the Ethereum network into numerous concurrent networks. This will make it possible for the network scaling to be more efficient. The immediate effect of such a move will be that congestion on Ethereum will drop significantly. Afterwards, it would mean better transaction speeds and lower fees for transactions.

The tweet by Vitalik was accompanied by an image showing 12 shards in action. It has also been reported that vitalik has talked about Sharded Ethereum on Reddit. He has said that the sharded network will come with 100 shards. Each shard will have the same capacity as the main blockchain.

However, Vitalik has added that everything is not complete. However, they already have a well-established bag of ideas on how to implementing sharding. He noted that the sharding code will be attached to Ethereum when the proof of stake, called Casper is in the final stages of completion.

Everything Is Still Fluid

The co-founder of Ethereum has added that the suggestions for Ethereum sharding are always evolving. Vitalik has even revealed the minimal sharding protocol. The project is a project where developers can use without wondering if the current changes will affect their efforts later. The goal of sharding is to boost the blockchain’s capacity to make it possible to boost many transactions by many users.

Why Sharding Matters?

In the past, a developer of Ethereum, James Ray, had been working on a scaling solution dubbed Drops of Diamond. He said that the need for nodes to verify each transaction limits the scaling. For instance, this has meant that on Bitcoin, there can only be 3-7 transactions every second. On ethereum, there is an upper limit of 7-15. Thus, sharding will enable only a few nodes to verify every transaction.

The need for sharding is quite high in the Ethereum blockchain. This is because Ethereum is going to power a lot of decentralized application in future. These apps and decentralized exchanges use a huge amount of transactions on Ethereum. This figure will only continue to grow. Even with the use of off chain methods, there is still a need for more capacity, which Sharding will provide.