Ethereum and the Scalability Issues
I am an Ethereum supporter from A to Z but we have to assume that the Vitalik’s project has many issues with the Blockchain scalability. We can see how the fee gas prices are increasing in the lastest days and that’s because the DeFi projects came to the party (it is the next thing people say). I have analyzing the different options that these DeFi projects will be facing in the future and definitely Ethereum blockchain was not created for these type of projects. We know that Vitalik is working hard in ETH 2.0 and PoS in order to solve these issues but, as I said before, they have a real problem with the Scalability.
I have also studied the possibility to use the DAG technology but it has the same problem, nothing new or even worst in order to fix the actual problems.
Where is the Solution?
I recently joined a project called RADIX DLT. You probably don’t know about them but this project could solve the SCALABILITY issues than the other Blockchains are facing nowadays and can not solve.
Radix is the future of DeFi, that’s a reality.
Decentralized finance applications are currently being built on protocols that were not designed to meet the needs and requirements of DeFi services. Radix is using a significant technology innovations to be the first layer 1 protocol specifically built to serve the rapidly growing DeFi industry and that’s what we need. Radix is based on a sharding system and without losing the Composability.
What is Sharding?
Sharding is just breaking a single database into smaller, more manageable chunks, and distributing those chunks across multiple servers, in order to spread the load and maintain a high throughput.
There are two main ways of cutting up a database — vertical partitioning and horizontal partitioning.
* Vertical partitioning happens when different tables from the same database are stored in different instances. Each table is a distinct shard. A simple example of this would be putting all the transactions from North America in one table, and all the transactions from Europe in another table.
* Horizontal Partitioning splits the database table into separate sets of rows, and these rows are stored in different database instances. Each set of rows is a shard. A simple example of this would be ‘“Server 1’” taking rows 1 to 10,000 and “Server 2” taking rows 10,001 to 20,000, and so on.
Why is Sharding so important?
If a server cannot handle the requested number of operations, you can split that data set into parts that can be stored on different hosts.
For example, if we split a single table into two partitions, then each host will need to handle half of the operations of the original host. As the operation requests increase, the database can be split into more and more parts.
My personal Opinion about sharding after a deep research:
Sharding has pros and cons. The security of the network might be compromised as sharding makes it possible to launch Single-Shard Takeover Attack (1% Attack), where a simple attacker could create a malicious shard by taking over the majority (more than 50%) of collators in any shard. A 1% Attack is easier to be launched compared to the 51% Attack, which requires more than 50% of the network’s computing power and that’s not easy.
If we want fix this problem, we could say that every single shard gets assigned a validator that is random-sampled from a pool. If we do that, the validator does not know which shard it gets beforehand, so chances it will collude with a malicious node are really minimized.
There are many information out there regarding the Sharding solutions for the Scalability issues instead a normal Blockchain but I really think that we have a lot of work ahead and there is not a final solution for all these possible problems. I have tried to explain my experience with this amazing project and why I think Radix will help to the crypto space in the nearest future.
Find attached more information about this project:
Radix DLT Website: https://www.radixdlt.com
Radix DLT Medium page: https://medium.com/@radixdlt
Radix DLT Official Telegram: https://t.me/radix_dlt
Radix DLT Official Twitter: https://twitter.com/RadixDLT
eth address: 0xBBd6e8B4a644a1a511fd95f6a0e81Db3C03a7E16
Cheers.
R4H