Sharding and Scalability of Ethereum

Ethereum has long faced scalability issues: the network can only process about 15-30 transactions per second, far below traditional payment systems like Visa. To address this issue, Ethereum plans to enhance performance through sharding technology. Sharding will divide the Ethereum network into multiple parallel chains (shards), with each shard independently processing transactions and data, thereby increasing overall throughput. Sharding is expected to be implemented in the coming years, at which point Ethereum could handle thousands of transactions per second. Additionally, the Ethereum ecosystem relies on Layer 2 solutions (such as Optimism and Arbitrum) to alleviate pressure on the mainnet, which significantly reduces costs by processing transactions off-chain and settling them on the main chain. Although the implementation of sharding is complex, it is the cornerstone for Ethereum to achieve large-scale applications.