Sharding

Sharding is a blockchain scaling method wherein network responsibilities are split across groups of nodes ('shards'), removing the need for all nodes to perform network services for the entire system. Of the responsibilities that can be sharded, the most common are transaction processing, state storage, and network sharding. The use of sharding for blockchains is inspired by traditional database sharding, which effectively breaks large data structures into smaller, more easily managed pieces. Sharding is considered a layer one approach to scalability as it does not rely on layer two systems such as Rollups.