Ethereum: progress in Sharding, Core developer shows Proof-of-Concept

Ethereum: progress in Sharding, Core developer shows Proof-of-Concept

Home News Ethereum: progress in Sharding, Core developer shows Proof-of-Concept

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Marcus Misiak –
15.09.2018

According to the news, which came this week from the Ethereum Hackathon EthBerlin, has made the long-time Core developer Vlad Zamfir great progress in the development of Ethereums Sharding solution. Effectively he has a Proof-of-Concept programmed, demonstrated that certain Ethereum Shards are able on the Blockchain to communicate.

In a conversation with Coindesk, Zamfir explained that he has programmed together with other developers, as Tim Beiko and John Marling a Proof-of-Concept, however, is “not even close” are ready to use it in the Mainnet. In Essence, Vlad Zamfir and his co-developers have demonstrated, however, that the ETH can be about Shards in the Blockchain stored.

What Sharding is?

The idea of Sharding is the Ethereum Blockchain in countless segments (English: Shards), which are able to process transactions faster and more effective. Currently, each Node stores in the network all the information. While this has the advantage that the safety is extremely high, because a Manipulation is only possible with great difficulty. However, this has the great disadvantage that the scalability is severely limited. Here Sharding comes in. Ethereums Sharding solution, one that provides all of the information in the network to be divided into so-called Shards. This means that some Node must process only certain Shards, each Shard still has access to the information of the Other. Hereby, the scalability of Ethereum would be increased significantly.

At the Moment, many of the Ethereum developers try, including the co-founder Vitalik Buterin, to develop Sharding. These efforts, however, are still a work in progress and are at an early stage. Buterin has announced that Sharding should appear in 2020. Then the Ethereum Blockchain to be able to process (even if the Plasma is implemented), a Million transactions per second.

Buterin announced in may of this year, the Integration of Sharding is driven at high speed. Vitalik was that the specifications for Sharding is not yet fully completed, but good progress had been made.

Zamfirs Proof-of-Concept

The Proof-of-Concept Code by Vlad zamfir was written at the Hackathon in Berlin finished, most of the development took place, however, already prior to the event. Zamfir explained to Coindesk (freely translated):

I had to do some research at the Hackathon, I’ve implemented only a few things.

The developed Code is Buterin in may presented the draft includes rules on how the individual Shards are used in relation to the entire transaction history of the Blockchain in Accordance. Thus, Zamfir has managed a successful partitioning of the Ethereum Blockchain in Shards, which will initially serve primarily for educational purposes. In order for Sharding to be more developers. In the past, was discussed in the ETH-developer community that there are too few developers, the solutions are working on Sharding. Zamfir said:

There are a lot of people who are not able to see the research, especially if we do not publish the results of research, on which we are really proud of. And See this Software is something that some people find convincing.

The Proof-of-Concept is available on Github and includes a Visualizer, the user of the code base, and can simulate download. Zamfir stated, however, that the Proof-of-Concept is not yet complete, but in the next few weeks. As Zamfir said, there is currently a mechanism to send transaction fees and Routing messages from one Shard to Another:

We have no real Routing Protocol.

So Ethereum is finally for the mass adaption of ready-to-use, world-wide Protocol to be used is Sharding an extremely important development, even compared to the competition. 2019 is a very important, groundbreaking year in the Ethereum Ecosystem. We are excited to see where the journey goes.