Blockchain is peculiar for accuracy, efficient transactions, 100% secure data repository and its ability to innovate a paradigm shift to today’s business models. Its decentralised nature and immutability of records makes it one of the world’s greatest technological innovations of the century.

Despite the promises, its ubiquitousness and complete global adoption is been hampered by its Scalability. Scalability here refers to the amount of transactions processed per time, and the speed at which these transactions are completed. This is a problem that is also applicable to cryptocurrencies on the Blockchain.

The Nerves network will thrive on sharding in order to drive the efficiency of transactions and give users the best blockchain outcome.

The Challenge

Scalability is one of the reasons why major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are experiencing low throughput and are being under utilized as against the expectations of many.

Bitcoin Blockchain was able to process between 5–9 transactions in one second while Ethereum managed 12–30 transactions per second on a normal business day.

At the moment, the rate at which transactions are being processed on the Blockchain have become extremely slow. Folks who have purchased digital coins lately, can attest to this; with the most prominent crypto coin, Bitcoin, optimally processing a meagre 3–4 transactions per second (tps).

When juxtaposed with centralised payment methods such as MasterCard, Visa (8,000 tps and optimally, up to 60,000 tps) or PayPal (450 tps), it is with no doubts that the crypto Blockchain is performing below par and cannot yet be considered a viable alternative for everyday transaction.

With the increasing worldwide demand for fast-paced processed transactions, If Blockchain is to gain massive adoption and stand a chance of replacing conventional payment methods, and then there is a need to upsize transaction speed.

As easy as this might sound, its technicalities are quite complicated. Based on the fact that Blockchain is decentralized in nature, and all distributed ledgers must be 100% secured cryptographically, it is a bit more difficult to scale up like a centralised payment method.

Thankfully, developers in the Nerves team are committed to deploy sharding to its full capacity in the design of the Nerves blockchain.

What is Blockchain Sharding?

Sharding is a widely utilised concept in computer databases and it is used to improve their efficiency. In layman terms, sharding is simply division of labour between nodes on a network.

Technically defined, Sharding is a concept that allows large databases to be partitioned into shards with each stored on different server instances thereby, splitting processing power and making the data more manageable. A shard is simply a horizontal portion of a database.

How Sharding Works: Share it and Pace it up

Blockchain is a consensus friven-funcitonality among nodes on the network. This means that all nodes must reach a consensus before transactions and smart contracts on the blockchain can be validated and executed. You can only imagine how much time this will take.

On the other hand, the unavailability of any node on the network could result in a backlog of unconfirmed transactions and subsequently, a drastic reduction in number of transactions executed per second.

With Sharding, the manner with which blocks are validated is made better. Databases are split in smaller portions (shards) with each unit running a macrocosm of the consensus protocol in parallel. This means that each node (computer) on the network will only have to handle a fraction of the data (unconnected subsets), and not the entirety of the information.

Nodes that manage a shard do so in a shared manner, and do not load the information on the whole of the Blockchain. When this concept is implemented, decentralization is still held sacrosanct.

Hence, Sharding of the Blockchain network can help speed up the execution of operations on the network. The more the shards, the more tasks the Blockchain can handle and the faster the rate of execution. Therefore, with the expansion of the network, throughput significantly increases.

Recent Implementations

At the moment, some key projects have commenced work on implementing sharding technology — most notably, Ethereum, based on market capitalization rankings. In the early months 2018, Ethereum rolled out a Proof of Concept (POC) and Vitalik Buterin made it known that the project team have made significant progress towards developing a shard-based blockchain.

It is not yet certain by how much sharding would improve possible transactions in each second. Buterin and various other experts on the Blockchain have proposed a million transactions in one second as the likeliest result.

Another high-ranked projects that has ventured into solving Blockchain’s scalability limitation with the aid of sharding technology is Zilliqa. Developed by a group of researchers from the NUS (National Universty of Singapore), Zilliqa is the very first blockchain-based platform to utilize the sharding technology.

In its November 2017 internal test release, Zilliqa was able to achieve 2,488 tps utilising 3,600 Amazon EC2 nodes and a total of 6 shards. This project aims to make its mainnet public in the 3rd quarter of 2018.

With Nerves Blockchain, not only will sharding be optimized, the concentric areasof security and efficiency will be guaranteed. This will be the point of departure from other blockchains mentioned above.

Benefits of Sharding on Nerves Blockchain

Implementing a shard-based blockchain offers several potential benefits. Some of these benefits include:

As against 5–9 tps, it will become possible to process thousands of transaction or more every second thereby, changing the perception of the public about cryptocurrencies as an efficient payment method

Throughputs will be increased and there will be more users and use cases of decentralized systems

It will further advocate the mainstream adoption of the blockchain tech and cryptocurrencies.

More nodes will be attracted to the public network, making coin mining a lot more profitable.

With regards to cryptocurrencies, sharding can help eclipse transaction time that could surpass centralised payment processors such as Visa, Paypal etc.

Conclusion

Sharding is a promising technology on many levels. From the advancements of Blockchains, to its ability to expedite transaction rates and the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies, it is redefining how we live.

Nerves Blockchain is optimized for the best outcomes in the 5th generation of blockchains as the world transits gradually but steadily to a blockchain age.