Bitcoin Global News (BGN)

January 08, 2019 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire -- Over the course of 2018, one of the key topics in the cryptocurrency space was the issue of how the leading cryptocurrency networks plan to scale over the long-term. Central to this discussion has been the Ethereum network, which has, to-date, received five major proposals as to how the scaling of its’ blockchain could be achieved.

Until today, it seemed like none of these ideas would rise to the head of the pack and the network would go ahead with all of them, almost simultaneously, even though they target similar areas in similar ways.

At this point, the reason that all of these ideas might simultaneously work is that the development community appears to have taken the highlights of each proposal, while making sure that none of them conflict with each other.

For example, one targets the overall aspects of how Ethereum’s native currency functions economically, while another aims to gradually scale down its’ fees, which are seen as exorbitant at times.

Today, CoinDesk penned an article in response to an event yesterday that just might change all of this, at least partially. In it, they detail a $5 million grant that the Ethereum foundation has given to one of the five teams working on Constantinople. Parity Technologies, which is the team in question, appears to have gained the foundation’s favor for a few reasons, including the fact that they are working on implementing sharding across the network.

If you are not well-versed on what sharding is, it can help to first imagine how a blockchain achieves anything now. In a nutshell, any sort of agreement has to be reached by all of the network’s nodes or users. Because of this, most major networks are experiencing high latency due to the wait times required for everyone to approve every proposal.

With is in mind, imagine what would happen if all of a blockchain’s active users were automatically split into groups, each of which handled different proposals or groups of transactions without conflicting with each other.

That is what sharding is reportedly able to facilitate.

In the end, at least temporarily, it is reasonable to conclude that if Parity is able to bring this about across the Ethereum network, then they will come out of the chaos as the development leader for its’ future efforts.

By: BGN Editorial Staff