It has been said that Layer 1 sharding is not a good idea due to limited reliability and security for scalability. I’m no sharding expert, but I have to disagree based on what I thought I knew about sharding. If anyone feels this is true, please educate me on why this is.
I’ll break this down piece by piece based on what I’ve seen from some of the projects implementing layer sharding.
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I’ve tested SEELE the most extensively of any layer 1 sharding solution. They currently have 4 shards. I am impressed with the reliability within shards and between different shards from a transaction perspective. All of my transactions arrive, regardless of the shard I send from/receive on. When I increase the fee, it arrives faster.
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If we’re talking scaling from a smart contract perspective, this is where SEELE has a weakness; currently smart contracts between different shards isn’t possible on their network. So limited scalability in this perspective would be accurate. However, other sharding platforms such as MultiVac will have smart contract functionality between shards. Once they release their testnet 3.0 I will be able to do a legitamit test, but for now I will take their word.
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Security doesn’t seem to be limited or impacted at all on SEELE due to it being a layer 1 sharding platform. In fact, it seems security would be better since someone would have to take over multiple shards to control the network, which would seem more difficult than simply 51% attacking an individual shardless network.
Just curious on everyone’s thoughts on this. Maybe I’m missing something here.