Growth of shard chain ecosystems

Shard chains are a small subset of the existing blockchains today, but they have attained significant traction of late, with notable growth in games such as DeFi Kingdoms on Harmony One and the launch of Aurora, the EVM-compatible chain of Near Protocol. The main reasons for the growth of these ecosystems are the actual utility of the applications launched in their respective ecosystems, as well as the improved user experience in terms of faster block times and lowered gas fees. An overview of the technical details behind shard chains can be found in this earlier research piece.

In terms of shard chains that have been relatively successful, we define them by two criteria: one, they must have at least successfully implemented some form of sharding, and two, the specified protocol’s market capitalization. As a result, the four protocols which are going to be covered in this piece would be Elrond ($5.1B in market cap), Near ($4.9B), Harmony One ($2.4B), and Zilliqa ($0.8B).