Vitalik Buterin has recommended that developers work on building a skeletal version of a sharding system until the Ethereum community is able to produce a more precise vision of how sharding will work.
Recognizing that proposed schemas for an Ethereum "sharding[1]" system are constantly evolving, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin has unveiled what he calls a "minimal sharding protocol[2]." The concept is billed as a sharding project that developers can work on without wondering whether the ongoing shifting of the sharding goalposts will later render their contributions useless.
Sharding has been pitched as a means to help blockchains scale up their capacity in order to be able to process many transactions by many users.
While the Ethereum network has faced challenges[3] related to high transaction volumes, the platform is as functional as it is today in large part because it is still a relatively niche technology. In its current form, it would very likely be unable to service the number of users that would rely on it in a post-mainstream adoption scenario.
In a sharding system, a contract (alternatively[4] called the "validator manager contract," or VMC, and "sharding manager contract," or SMC) on the main blockchain helps to maintain many shards, each of which is also a blockchain. This could significantly reduce the amount of data per transaction that needs to be written to the main blockchain, enabling the network as a whole to scale up.
Now to the nuts and bolts: in Buterin's new scheme, "anyone" can propose a header for a particular shard at any time. A block header is a hash that contains information referring to the new transactions (and any other data, in Ethereum's case) contained within
