Sharding

In recent times, many projects have identified and adopted sharding as a way to increase transactional throughput in layer 1 blockchains. Sharding is defined as the partitioning of large transaction sets into smaller sets, also known as shards, that can be processed in parallel by different nodes in the network. Since each participating node is tasked with storing and processing data relevant to its own shard, no single node is burdened with the entire transactional load of the network. At the same time, sharding does not sacrifice the blockchain’s inherent security and transparency features since the data stored by any node is visible to all the other nodes.