Sharding is a term used in blockchain technology to describe the process of dividing data stored on a blockchain into smaller pieces that can be processed faster. Blockchains are the backbone of cryptocurrencies and they’re what make it possible to own digital assets without a central authority. The blockchain is a distributed ledger that stores the entire history of transactions and data, which is copied on all nodes.
The distributed ledger is shared among many computers (nodes), each of which has its own copy of the blockchain. The computers are all in agreement about what transactions have taken place, and which blocks are valid. This means that the blockchain is not scalable because it grows linearly with the number of transactions. The only way to make it more scalable is to divide it into smaller blocks and store them on different nodes. This process is called sharding.
Sharding means partitioning database tables into smaller pieces called shards, so that different queries can be processed in parallel by different servers. Sharding increases the capacity of systems by distributing data across multiple servers, which helps with scalability issues and improves performance dramatically. This also makes it possible for people to work on different sections at the same time, and also increases the number of transactions that can be processed by a single node.
Sharding helps to improve scalability by splitting up the network and distributing it across different nodes. This allows for more transactions per second without slowing down the network. Sharding also improves security by ensuring that no single node has access to all of the data on the blockchain.
The process of sharding starts with identifying a set of nodes as a “shard” and then assigning each node in that shard its own subset of data from the original database or ledger.
