ny transactions in parallel, could we not split up transaction processing between smaller groups of nodes to greatly increase a blockchain's total throughput?</p>
<h2 id="what-is-the-basic-idea-behind-sharding">What is the basic idea behind sharding?</h2>
<p>We split the state and history of Ethereum up into partitions that we call “shards”. For example, a sharding scheme on Ethereum might put all addresses starting with 0x00 into one shard, all addresses starting with 0x01 into another shard, etc. In t