Status, also known as Status.im, released a lightweight Sharding client, called Nimbus, to scale the Ethereum protocol and create a better ecosystem for decentralized applications (dApps) in processing information.

First Mobile Client for dApp Applications

Since its launch in 2017, the development team of Status set its focus on improving mainstream adoption of Ethereum by deploying a client with an intuitive user interface (UI) and seamless user experience that can handle dApps and various operations on the Ethereum protocol.

In essence, the concept of Status is very similar to China’s WeChat, but in a decentralized version. On WeChat, a mobile messaging app used by more than 500 million people, users can send messages, payments and run applications. Status is similar in that it enables users to also send messages, payments and run applications, all of which are based on the decentralized Ethereum network instead of a centralized server.

However, to run such a platform on a decentralized protocol, a large capacity to handle many transactions per second is necessary to ensure each user is able to send as many messages, payments and data requests the app demands.

Previously, Coinbase co-founder and former Goldman Sachs executive Fred Ehrsam said that to scale Ethereum to the level of Facebook or other major platforms like WeChat, Ethereum needs to be able to process more than 750,000 transactions or data requests per second. Right now, Ethereum is able to do about 13 transactions per second.

Hence, for a team like Status to even attempt to grow an Ethereum-based messaging platform to the size of WeChat and Facebook, the base protocol’s scalability will have to be significantly improved.

This week, the Status team revealed plans to speed up the development and adoption of Sharding, one of the two main scaling solutions alongside Plasma, which the open-source developer community of Ethereum have been focusing on over the past year.

“In order to advance the collective work on scaling Ethereum, we have been building our own client, called Nimbus, which has a particular focus on sharding,” researchers at Status said, adding “Sharding, Plasma, STARKs, better signature aggregation—all of these things will contribute to the sort of network and transaction processing speed we all need to make Ethereum a truly global phenomenon and actually build a more open, transparent, and secure internet.”

With Nimbus, developers will be able to deploy mobile applications on Ethereum with the scalability benefits from Sharding to optimize the blockchain for Internet of Things (IoT) devices, embedded devices and large-scale dApps. The Status team commented:

“The impact we hope to make with Nimbus is to add a mobile-first implementation to the Ethereum client ecosystem, ultimately increasing its resilience and potential user base.”

The Road Toward a Million Transactions Per Second

As Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin said, the deployment of Sharding and Plasma could potentially increase the capacity of the Ethereum network from 13 transactions per second to 1 million transactions per second, which may allow Ethereum-based dApps to scale to the size of Facebook, Twitter and WeChat.

Blockchain projects such as 0x, Status and Zilliqa have made significant progress in testing second-layer solutions to improve the capacity and scalability of Ethereum to provide a better ecosystem for dApps and to establish an infrastructure on Ethereum for mainstream adoption, seeing the long-term.