On the first Prime Day of 2023, Amazon facilitated the sale of 375 million items. Just one store, during one of its busiest days of the year, provides the ultimate convenience for its users—a testament to the decades of infrastructure development in web2.

Contrast this with the never-ending possibilities of a unified web3 ecosystem, which, although spoken of widely, seems increasingly challenging to achieve, characterized by fragmented systems, prolonged transaction times, and prohibitive costs.

Advocates of web3 have long sought to accelerate efforts to mirror web2’s seamless experience and benchmarks. The biggest impediment to this dream is ensuring scalable networks that retain decentralization with growth. 

Enter sharding tech. It has spoken widely and been experimented globally, and now, finally, it is a reality. From what the developer community has seen of it so far, it may well be the messiah the web3 community has been long waiting for. And rightly so!

Sharding tech at work

Let’s accept it. The existing web3 model is relatively slow, inefficient, and costly. It’s difficult to convince the majority of the world’s internet users, let alone companies and even the developer community, to make a fast switch from the simplicity and convenience of web2.

Sharding tech’s newfound emergence now makes it more than an urban myth. While the tech has been spoken of quite a bit by the industry’s titans, the launch of the recent Sovereign Chains is the first-of-its-kind application incorporating this groundbreaking tech. One that is bound to advance the use cases of the top L1s and hundreds of L2s looking to solve for scalability and interoperability. 

At its core, sharding involves splitting the network into smaller, more manageable pieces, maintaining security, speed, negligible costs, and energy efficiency even at times of exponential activity. Theoretically sound, its practical implementation in Sovereign Chains now proves that it can solve web3’s most pressing challenges, in a way that’s economical, developer friendly and extremely resource efficient. This means creating a blockchain capable of 100X scaling compared to Ethereum or Bitcoin, at a fraction of time and energy. 

One of the biggest sectors that will benefit from sharding tech is decentralized finance. It’s no secret that to compete effectively with the current financial system, web3 must offer solutions that are tenfold superior in every measurable way. By deploying sharding tech, it’s possible to ensure that end users not only achieve parity with the legacy system but also enjoy improvements such as globally fair access, open playing fields, transparency, value creation, privacy, and security. 

The tech is built in a way that allows premier defi platforms to no longer be bound by blockchain-specific limitations, enabling interoperability with other defi products on any major chain, eliminating liquidity fragmentation, and unlocking significant capital efficiency improvements.

Beyond defi, the applications of sharding-tech-powered Sovereign Chains extend to gaming, healthcare, supply chain, education, government, and enterprise sectors. In gaming, for example, high throughput and low latency, combined with adjustable transaction fees, enable radically different business models and gameplays. Developers can introduce innovative in-game reward structures, new economies, auctions, time-sensitive airdrops, and more, ensuring seamless user experiences regardless of scale.

Understandably, all this leads to the foundation for the first-ever interconnected web3 ecosystem, inheriting capabilities such as on-chain 2FA, native standards, user-friendly aliases and more, to address critical challenges hindering widespread adoption of web3.

Driving adoption from the ground up

To gain mileage for any major breakthrough in the web3 world, the first step is to take the developer community into confidence. Almost the opposite of how consumer products in the traditional world target end consumers. What’s common, though, is the purpose to simplify people’s lives by acting on the needs of early adopters.

Composability of digital assets and unbreakable security are other key advantages that come with sharding tech’s scalable architecture, enabling developers to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure.

Sharding tech provides a robust and scalable foundation for building the next generation of dApps and interoperability of L2s with major crypto chains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. Something that’s much needed for developers to leverage multiple ecosystems’ strengths to create more versatile and powerful products for last-mile user consumption. 

The merging of various chains into an ecosystem goes beyond the traditional bridging of assets. Enhanced smart contract capabilities, custom VM environments, and comprehensive SDKs empower developers to create, test, and launch solutions that natively work on multiple chains more efficiently. This holistic approach lowers barriers to entry, inviting more talent, including the current web2 dev community, to explore blockchain tech without the limitation of past iterations. 

Advancing the case of Sovereign Chains

As the spotlight shines on the need for scalable web3 infrastructure in a world where security and data concerns are fast imploding, expect to see network features such as parallel processing, confidential transactions, or VM-specific improvements that can extend the inherent functionalities.

Achieving the seamless and expansive reach of existing web2 technology while fostering collaboration between chains is an ambitious yet attainable goal. Through sharding technology and the introduction of Sovereign Chains, it is now possible to not just dream but actually build a scalable, secure, and cost-efficient architecture that can support the creativity of current and future web3 developers.

Lucian Mincu is a visionary infrastructure engineer, co-founder, and chief information officer of MultiversX. He has extensive experience developing end-to-end startup solutions and designing and implementing highly complex infrastructure and network architectures. Lucian’s knack for solving complex technical challenges has been instrumental in establishing MultiversX as a Top-100 L1 project processing at a max of 263,000 transactions/second, with a growing ecosystem of over 8,200 dApps and 3,200 nodes. Before co-founding MultiversX, Lucian’s entrepreneurial and technical expertise was put into practice through co-founding and developing ICO Market Data, a platform for discovering ICO opportunities, filtering scams, and supporting blockchain projects.