For those who are trying to understand the Ethereum Scalability issue, Vitalik states that “The Scalability Trilemma” is the key to understanding the sharding process.  For clarity, Sharding is considered to be the future of Ethereum Scalability.

The problem statement of the Ethereum scalability issue inspired the solution:  “The Scalability Trilemma.”

The scalability Trilemma according to Ethereum talks about three important properties of the Blockchain.  And, every reliable blockchain should try to have the properties of scalability, decentralization, and security.

Vitalik acknowledges three classes of “easy solutions” like traditional blockchains, high-TPS chains, multi-chain ecosystems. These 3 easy solutions achieve only two out of the solutions like scalability, decentralization, and security. However, the sharding technique achieves all the desirable qualities expected out of a blockchain like scalability, decentralization, and security.

Sharding technology manages to do this by random sampling, where the job of randomly splitting up the work of doing the verification takes place randomly.  The validator list is also shuffled randomly. A group of validators who are allotted to verify a block or perform some other task are known as a committee. Validators attest the Verified blocks by publishing a signature.

For now, the whole of the Ethereum Developer Community know that Sharding is the future of the Ethereum Scalability. When this becomes a real-time possibility, the ecosystem will be greatly helped and several thousands of transactions per second will permit several users from across the world to be able to make use of the platform for an affordable cost.

Sharding according to Vitalik is the most misunderstood concepts in the Ethereum ecosystem and in blockchain ecosystems.  Sharding is about very specific set of ideas that have specific properties; however, sharding many times get combined with several other techniques which have weaker security properties and thus the capability of sharding gets confused.

Sharding has specific properties and it differs from other non-sharding technologies greatly.  There are some sacrifices that a sharded system should make to achieve the 3 desirable properties of the blockchain.  Vitalik has proposed how sharding can be improved with better security models. He points to how the lack of this extra security is the key weakness of the more centralized high-TPS chains.

He stated, “Ideally, we want to have a form of sharding that avoids 51% trust assumptions for validity, and preserves the powerful bulwark of security that traditional blockchains get from full verification. And this is exactly what much of our research over the last few years has been about.”

Those who are willing to get to know the exhaustive details should visit the page on Why sharding is great: demystifying the technical properties.