Sharding

A scalability technique that divides a blockchain's state and transaction processing into multiple parallel segments called 'shards,' each capable of processing transactions independently. Instead of every node processing every transaction, different groups of validators handle different shards, dramatically increasing overall throughput. Ethereum's long-term roadmap includes danksharding, which focuses specifically on creating abundant, cheap data availability for rollups rather than execution sharding. Near Protocol is an example of a live sharded blockchain.