So what is this term “sharding” all about.
Its basically a term which has to do with how blockchain companies are now in 2021 starting to split up databases to make less congestion in the network so that more transactions can happen per second.
Ethereum 1.0 is to said to use the paradigm of “sharding” which will come in a series of phases while Ethereum 2.0 is said to use the paradigm of “rollups”.
Sharding is an old term in computer science for breaking up a network but is now coming into the publics parlance with the use in the Crypto and blockchain world.
In technical terms the phase one of Ethereum’s “Serenity” upgrade will break up the Ethereum blockchain into 64 shard chains which is then controlled by something called the Ethereum Beacon chain.
Everything underlying crypto and blockchains has to do with mathematics and fast processing of numbers like the hash number by miners who must be paid for their effort.
The original Ethereum was based on the POW Power of Work model and as a result a lot of energy and resources was used up by miners who had to be paid and the fees called gas fees were passed down to the users who were trying to buy things like low priced NFTs with high priced Ethereum gas fees.
The newer model called POS or Proof of stake takes away some of the power of the big miners and cuts down the energy and gas fees considerably and lets the small miner run their computers with much less power and heat or electricity.