Foundations of Blockchain

Sharding in blockchain

A decentralized blockchain network consists of a number of nodes in order to achieve the highest possible level of decentralization. The security of the network increases with the number of nodes added to the network. But the population of nodes doesn't contribute to the scalability of the network. In fact, it is difficult to scale with an increased number of nodes. Ethereum proposed a sharding technique where the entire blockchain and its state is split into partitions called shards.

The sharding scheme in Ethereum can be partitioned into any number of shards that maintain their own history and state. Let's consider a scheme where a blockchain is partitioned into K shards based on some criteria. An example criterion ...