Bitcoin Global News (BGN)
September 14, 2018 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire -- With Coindesk’s most
recent article hinting at a breakthrough in sharding, it seemed
like we had finally gotten closer to improving the scaling
capability of the Ethereum network.
As you may or may not know, Vlad
Zamfir is usually credited as Vitalik Buterin’s right hand man in
terms of tirelessly working to increase the efficiency as well as
the overall potential of the Ethereum network.
One of the specific projects that
he is most closely tied to is working on implementing sharding with
Ethereum.
If you do not already know,
sharding is a concept that has been around since long before the
Blockchain rose to popularity in its current state. In a nutshell,
sharding may be defined as a special way to horizontally partition
data inside of a database.
In the context of Blockchain
technology, it arguably becomes a much more important concept. To
quickly recap, because of the way that Ethereum is structured, all
nodes are essentially the same and must therefore all validate and
hold copies of the Ethereum Blockchain. Because this is true, as
user numbers increase quickly and almost exponentially, the
network’s consensus method stays the same. Everyone still has to
agree on and validate every block, which as the network grows,
causes it to experience slow downs. In Ethereum’s case, these are
becoming somewhat legendary in the industry.
Due to the fact that all of this is
true, Zamfir, Buterin, and others have been working on giving the
Ethereum network the ability to shard, which manifests itself in an
interesting way on a Blockchain network.
A quote by Buterin actually
explains this quite well when he suggests that you can think of
Ethereum as a sort of continent now, but if sharding were
implemented, then it would function as a series of separate
islands. These islands would be effectively like smaller Ethereum’s
with the ability to use any of the network’s features as well as
validate and store data on their own. The kicker would be that if
these islands wanted to connect in some way, then some sort of
protocol or something akin to a token bridge would have to be built
for them to do so.
Now that the general context of
what sharding is, is understood, it is easy to jump back to the
current state of the issue. In Coindesk’s most recent piece on the
subject, as mentioned above, they hint at a breakthrough being made
this week on the subject of sharding. In truth, what occurred is a
step in the right direction, which is not quite on the level of a
breakthrough but still important.
To explain further, as of today,
Coindesk published an article for which they interviewed Zamfir on
the current state of sharding with Ethereum. In it, Zamfir revealed
that the team that is working on the issue has just reached a proof
of concept on one of the core parts of sharding. In effect, what
this means is that they basically proved with a reasonable degree
of certainty that sharding can be an effective solution with
Ethereum.
Now, only one question remains:
when will it actually go live?
By: BGN Editorial Staff
News:
Ethereum
(ETH)
Cryptocurrency