Blockchain technology has the potentials to bring about a world with no centralized authorities, no disparity, no unnecessary intermediaries etc.

Before the above-stated dream can be fully achieved a lot of advancements and innovations would have to be made to the current blockchain. One such innovation is blockchain Sharding.

Sharding in nutshell refers to as dividing of a large block into a smaller block so that each block can function on its own. It can be likened to how a country gets divided into multiple states, in order to have a better governance system.

Sharding in blockchain context refers to dividing of the nodes of a network into several subgroups called shards, each executing tasks meant for the original nodes in a predefined way thereby improving overall system processing capacity.

With sharding, a lot of transactions will get validated at the same time on the blockchain network. This form of parallel processing will improve the performance of the system multi-fold.

Sharding allows for flexibility to the blockchain network, as storage of all transactions on every single network node becomes unnecessary, which in-turn helps on the scalability front. Even after sharding the Blockchain network still remains fairly robust and secure.

Though sharding help solves some crucial blockchain problem it does come with its share of issues. One of the biggest flaws with Sharding is that communication among shards is not very easy.

What it means is that, so long as communication occurs within a Shard, there would be no problem. But if for instance, a user (say Mike) who belongs to Shard-1 wants to transact with another user (say Hannah) from Shard-2, the transaction would require some protocols to complete.

A blockchain developer would have to program his own codes to handle this Sharding schema that is comprised of a cluster isolated Shards.

Generally, before sharding can be implemented there are few requirements that have to be met. Such requirement includes:

1. Sharding must guarantee data consistency, it would be a waste of time and resources to implement sharding where there is no consistency of data.

2. Shards are restricted by size, as the system fault tolerance must be maintained. The quantity of nodes for sharding has a lower limit

3. The sharding consensus is restricted. Prove of work (POW) may be unsuitable due to the small number of nodes.

Currently, the ethereum platform supports sharding by dividing all nodes into several portions of one cycle and distribute the contract to each shard. Sharding would be redone after the cycle. Though this concept works it has the following defect:

1. The sharding consensus is the same to the lower level consensus, so the sharding function will not be available unless the main net is switched to POS

2. It needs global memory to save the sharding information etc.

From the above paragraph, it’s obvious that ethereum sharding policy is suffering from some defect that in a way is hampering efficiency and impeding the full achievement of blockchain goal.

MOAC’s sharding is realized through MOAC’s layered architecture. The lower level of MOAC uses POW to ensure the consistency of all data.

Unlike the sharding method of ethereum, MOAC sharding adopts a contract-driven mode. This means that each contract corresponds to a system shard. For more technical information regarding how MOAC implements its sharding policy read this article from the MOAC technical Column.

Sharding major advantage is that it will improve the system processing rate. Thereby enabling the blockchain network to scale. MOAC will use sharding alongside other concepts to create a blockchain platform that is very fast, efficient and scalable.

You can find MOAC at

Website: https://moac.io/

GitHub: https://github.com/MOACChain/moac-core

Twitter: https://twitter.com/moac_io

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MOAC/

Medium: https://medium.com/moac

Steemit: https://steemit.com/@moac-official

Telegram (International): https://t.me/moacblockchain

Telegram (Developers): https://t.co/8m3m9RD5ix

Telegram (China): https://t.co/73rU9sHWLH

YouTube (Event Channel): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBU405W7vfOPBicLwW9-QOA

Youtube (Technical Channel): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_U54wsGNrm_Yivj5bH9i7Q?view_as=subscriber

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/moacchain/

