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Review on Zilliqa by Soren Laramée
To prevent scalability issues, Zilliqa uses a method called sharding…
To prevent scalability issues, Zilliqa uses a method called sharding.
Sharding is a type of database partitioning — it breaks down databases into smaller, faster, and more easily manageable parts called data shards. These data shards are thus fractions of a database, meaning that the data shards only contain fractions of the information.
Therefore the shards are meaningless in themselves; their content is only valuable when put together. Sharding also allows for all data shards to be stored across multiple servers.
In the case of Zilliqa, sharding is used to divide all the work of verifying transactions and securing the network across the network. The verification of transactions is done by a group consisting of a maximum 600 nodes, called a shard. Whenever the threshold of 600 nodes is reached, a new shard is created.
Pros
- You might remember how I mentioned earlier that Digibyte performs much better than most other cryptocurrencies, so in reality, this would actually be a reasonable thing to happen. For example, Litecoin, which at the time of writing is the sixth most valuable coin, can only manage transaction speeds of 2.5 minutes.
Cons
- At the core of these scalability issues are the nodes employed by blockchains. Nodes verify transactions and secure the network. The problem with nodes is that the more there are in a network, the harder it becomes to agree on transactions; thus it becomes harder to reach consensus. For most blockchains, the development teams have tried to solve the scalability issues with a whole array of solutions such as side-chains and masternodes. However, most of these solutions come with new disadvantages; most prevalent being the sacrifice of full decentralization. Zilliqa solves the scalability problem directly on its blockchain by employing an entirely new technological solution while remaining fully decentralized.
