What is Shard?
Let's find out Shard meaning, definition in crypto, what is Shard, and all other detailed facts.
Essentially, a shard is a chunk of a blockchain network that appeared after a chain was split during the process of sharding. Shards can be defined in two ways – by the digital asset they contain and by their properties. Each shard can share its data with other shards, preserving a core feature of blockchain technology – the existence of a distributed ledger.
When a huge flow of users enters the blockchain network, it results in latency. Sharding is a great method for reducing latency by breaking a blockchain network into independent shards, each of which has its own data and is isolated from the others.
Besides, it’s really difficult for an attacker to predict which shards would be suitable to infect with their malicious nodes. This is the case because nodes of certain blockchains are constantly reassigned to different shards at random times.
Sharding makes hosting full nodes a lot more convenient. When sharding is properly handled in a blockchain, each user can store just a portion of the database's history of changes, rather than the full history, as is the case by default.