OKX Blockchain 60 Lectures | Episode 27: What Is Sharding Technology?

Hello everyone, I'm Xiao K. Today we're going to talk about: "What Is Sharding Technology"?

Simply put, sharding technology, like the sidechains, Lightning Network, and SegWit technologies we mentioned earlier, is a technology born to solve the efficiency and scalability problems of blockchain. The difference is that it wasn't originally designed to solve Bitcoin's congestion issues, but rather Ethereum's efficiency problems.

Ethereum is a smart contract platform built on blockchain, much like the Android OS on our phones. Developers can create various decentralized apps (dApps) on it, but due to blockchain's efficiency limitations, these dApps struggle to compete with the centralized apps we use daily. To solve this problem, someone proposed whether the sharding technology from traditional internet databases could be introduced into blockchain — and thus blockchain sharding was born.

Sharding technology gets its name from the principle of "divide and conquer." It originated from traditional centralized databases and is used to improve database processing efficiency. A shard is a horizontal partition of a database, with each shard stored on a separate server, distributing the load and greatly enhancing efficiency. Here's how it works in blockchain:

We need to understand that blockchain is also a database, but it has a chain structure. This chain must handle all the system's functions, and every transaction must be processed through all nodes before being confirmed. Under this approach, processing efficiency naturally can't keep up.

Sharding technology offers a solution by dividing this chain into individual regions — each region is called a shard. Each shard handles a dedicated function, and nodes are distributed across shards to process their respective workloads. This way, when processing transactions, they are distributed across shards for simultaneous handling, much like different departments working together. Each node only processes a small portion of the network's transactions, which greatly improves the chain's processing efficiency.

However, this raises a new problem: network security and decentralization are compromised. For example, originally, if I wanted to act maliciously in your network, due to the consensus mechanism, I would need to take control of most nodes across the entire network. But now, since sharding distributes nodes into smaller regions, I only need to control the majority of nodes in one small region.

Therefore, another crucial mechanism in sharding technology is random distribution. It has a dedicated component responsible for generating random numbers and assigning nodes to other shards, randomly distributing nodes. This way, anyone trying to act maliciously would have a hard time knowing which nodes are in a particular region, greatly increasing the cost of malicious behavior. This allows sharding technology to solve efficiency and scalability issues while maintaining security and decentralization.

Overall, while sharding is currently one of the mainstream technologies used to address blockchain efficiency and scalability problems, because the technology originated from traditional internet databases, this solution cannot be directly applied to a decentralized blockchain. As a result, the sharding concept has been proposed for years but still hasn't been implemented.

However, thanks to its characteristics, once implemented, this technology could extremely likely accelerate the large-scale adoption of blockchain technology. So there have always been high expectations for it. Hopefully, as this technology matures, the blockchain world will also give rise to world-class super apps like Facebook and WeChat.

Special thanks to Ms. Xu Kun for her assistance and guidance on this episode.

Sina Weibo: @Xu Kun Alysa

The "OKX Blockchain 60 Lectures" is a blockchain educational animation series jointly produced by OKX and Sina Technology, designed for users with zero knowledge of blockchain. Through articles, educational animations, and other formats, it covers five major sections and 60 key points to vividly explain blockchain concepts from the perspectives of concepts, technology, and applications.

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