Welcome back to another edition of Zilliqa Zebra. Someone requested me to do a video to explain Zilliqa's sharding mechanism, so here goes!
And before I carry on, please don't forget to LIKE and SUBSCRIBE to Zilliqa Zebra for your usual dose of short educational visual clips on Zilliqa, its partners as well as related guides such as this.
Scalability has always been an issue for existing blockchain technologies. Bitcoin is unable process all the demand for its network, and transaction fees have risen accordingly. The same goes for Ethereum where limited throughput means smart contracts can become really gas-intensive.
A quick look at the Bitcoin average transaction fees saw it spiking to as high as USD 62.79 on 21st April 2021, which is not ideal for traders and trading activities. This is what Zilliqa aims to solve with its sharding mechanism.
To illustrate this point, let's think of blockchain consensus scaling in terms of people. With a small group of your closer friends, it is easy to make decisions. Even with differing opinions it's easy to discuss to reach a consensus.
If the group turns into thousands or millions of people, you will need a more complex voting system. The votes become harder to tabulate and you will need to do more checks on the validity of the votes.
Zilliqa tries to solve this issue with a model which implements a hybrid consensus protocol to grow this network's throughput with every 600 new nodes that join. This is also known as sharding.
Using the testnet example, when operating with 1800 nodes, the testnet divided itself into 3 shards. At 3600 nodes, it divided into 6 shards. Zilliqa can continue to divide the network and create more shard to cope with the increase in network nodes and activities.
The shards each process a fractional portion of the network's transactions. Hence, if there are 6 shards, each shard will process approximately 1/6 of the network's transactions. This keeps computing demands relatively stable as the network scales.
Each shard processes its assigned transactions into a microblock in parallel with the other shards. At the end of the parallel processing period, known as the “DS epoch,” those microblocks get combined into a full block that’s added to the blockchain.
Zilliqa employs practical byzantine fault tolerance protocol within each shard. I will cover this in my next video.
Don't forget to subscribe to my channel for more educational updates. And check out my other videos which might be of interest to you.
Zilliqa Zebra provides news, updates, how-to, guides and all things related to the Zilliqa, the first public blockchain to implement sharding on its mainnet. Zilliqa Zebra also shares weekly price predictions on Zilliqa.
Zilliqa Zebra is an ardent supporter of the Zilliqa blockchain.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/zilliqazebra
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/ZilliqaZebra
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ZilliqaZebra
Google Site: https://sites.google.com/view/zilliqazebra
