Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Assures ‘Sharding is Coming’ to the Blockchain Platform
Well, it looks like Ethereum blockchain platform is all set to climb over its scalability hurdles as founder Vitalik Buterin announced that Ethereum’s in-house scaling solution ‘Sharding’ is coming soon.
Buterin recently tweeted saying ‘Sharding is Coming’ and revealed a proof of concept on the Github community, indicating that the development of Sharding is in its last stage. On the Reddit community - that is full of users, developers, investors and enthusiasts - Buterin gave a more detailed description of the proof of concept.
Buterin said that the basic idea of the existing version of the Sharding’s proof of concept is surrounded by the implementation of a proof-of-stake beacon chain or full Casper and is merged into the main Ethereum blockchain network.
Buterin said: “The basic idea is based on a concept of dependent fork choice rules. First, there is a proof of stake beacon chain (in phase 4, aka full Casper, this will just be merged into the main chain), which is tied to the main chain; every beacon chain block must specify a recent main chain block, and that beacon chain block being part of the canonical chain is conditional on the referenced main chain block being part of the canonical main chain.”
The basic purpose of Sharding is to increase the number of transactions that the Ethereum blockchain can process. Sharding does this by optimizing the process of transaction verification and smart contracts by splitting Ethereum’s blockchain network into small partitions called shards.
Sharding can be viewed as multiple network computers dividing the workload between them. Instead of a single node having to go through the entire transaction history of the Ethereum blockchain network, Sharding will distribute this process by assigning certain nodes to certain shards. This helps to ease the congestion on the network by facilitating more transactions to take place in a short time and at reduced costs.
Buterin suggested that shard blocks would be taking less than 10 seconds to process the transactions. He wrote: “I would not say the spec is finalized at this point, though the ‘bag of ideas’ is IMO pretty well-established. The latest research consists of combining together existing ideas about scaling and latency (ie. block time) reduction.”
Earlier this year during the Ethereum Community Conference on March 9th, 2018, Buterin unveiled a new scaling solution for smart contract project called as ‘Plasma’ that aims to use the system of smart contracts, and therefore boost the overall capacity of Ethereum.