The future of scaling on the Ethereum network is the main issue in the mind of Vitalik Buterin these days, according to his ‘Modest Proposal’ offered at Devcon. The developer has been considering the massive problem of scaling facing the network as adoption of Ethereum and the smart contracts system it supports gains increasing market share.

According to Buterin’s proposal, the solution will involve ‘sharding.’ The concept of sharding would allow each node to store only a part of the complete network, while the nodes would be able to validate the network through the underlying mathematics and mutual communication. The issue, however, is that there is a risk of nodes sending other nodes false information, leaving Ethereum on the horns of a problem.

Sharding and more

However, Buterin has an idea about how to deal with the problem by splitting the network into different kind of shards. The main shard would house the main Ethereum network and side shards which would be available for more aggressive types of experimentation.

The statement included other coming upgrade proposals like stateless clients for faster syncs, upgrades for the EVM (Ethereum virtual machine) and a soon-to-be-announced proof of concept in Python.