Blockchain Sharding: Enhancing Scalability Without Sacrificing Security

The gift of the Blockchain technology to the world I must confess have really been a very great gift that I must confess that it has transform a lot aspect of our world most especially when it comes to the digital world in particular. With the Blockchain technology, there have been solutions that has been applied on several aspects of the world. Years ago, I always thought the application of Blockchain technology is only limited to the cryptocurrency world but right now it is beyond it.

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Now we have the application of it to other aspect like the supply chain management and many more. Though sometimes due to the nature of the Blockchain technology and the fact that it handle a whole lot of volumes of transactions soemtimes can slow it down and even lead to higher cost most especially in transactions fees. Among all these challenges that I mentioned, one of the popular solutions that have recently risen up is in the aspect of Blockchain sharding which I will be talking about today.

For many of us, the world Blockchain sharding might really be new. Shard means when data are distributed to a very more smaller pieces and spread across the network. With the Blockchain sharding mechanism, Blockchain network are divided into smaller unit so that each of the unit will be able to handle some set of transactions. It works in a way of division of labour as I will call it. So instead of a Blockchain network just handling the workload of the processing of transactions in high volumes and getting overwhelmed, the work was distributed to more networks that have been broken down to smaller units.

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Let me briefly talk about how sharding enhances Scalability on the Blockchain technology. Since the workload have been distributed to more smaller unit of the network broken down which is called shards, it makes it possible that the network will be able to handle a lot of transactions simultaneously and each of the shard will be able to handle the function collectively. A perfect example is the Ethereum 2.0 which has 64 shards according to my research, this makes it possible for the Ethereum network to be able to handle a lot of transactions per second.

But among all these things, there is a major disadvantage which if not handled can lead to more cases and that is the aspect of still maintaining security most especially in shared Blockchain. It is a major challenge because since those networks have been divided, it becomes more difficult to secure the data of those networks and which can give room for more malicious attacks much more.