Sharding
Splitting a blockchain's workload across parallel segments so the network scales without every node doing everything.
Sharding partitions a blockchain’s data or execution across many parallel “shards,” so each node handles a fraction of total work — in principle multiplying capacity while keeping validation affordable enough for ordinary hardware, preserving decentralization.
In practice, full execution sharding proved brutally hard (cross-shard composability, security dilution), and Ethereum pivoted: instead of sharding execution, it shards data availability for Layer 2 rollups (the “danksharding” roadmap; EIP-4844 blobs were the first step). Other chains (e.g. NEAR, TON) run their own sharding variants. The term now covers a family of scaling strategies rather than one design.