If you’ve spent any time in the blockchain space, studying the industry, its promises, and its challenges, you may have come across the term sharding. While sharding is far from a new concept in database management, it is a partitioning technique that is currently being tested within the context of blockchain as a potential answer to some of blockchain’s biggest obstacles that stand between blockchain and a future in which many of our everyday internet services rely on decentralized networks and benefit from their unique security promises.

Below we explain exactly what sharding is, how the different types of sharding work, and how it can solve one of the blockchain's toughest riddles.

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To summarize the technique of sharding in one sentence, you can think of it as dividing a blockchain into multiple subchains. These subchains all operate independently of each other and spread the network workload, improving throughput and reducing latency.