Sharding is not a new technique and has been used in distributed databases for scalability such as MongoDB and MySQL. The key idea behind sharding is to split up the tasks into multiple chunks that are then processed by multiple nodes. This results in improved throughput and reduced storage requirements. In blockchains, a similar scheme is employed whereby the state of the network is partitioned into multiple shards. The state usually includes balances, code, nonce, and storage. Shards are loosely coupled partitions of a blockchain that run on the same network. There are a few challenges related to inter-shard communication and consensus on the history of each shard. This is an open area for research.
Sharding
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