State of Scaling Issue 7: Reviewing Shard Chain Ecosystems

The crypto markets have generally been on the decline due to worsening macroeconomic conditions. However, lull periods in the markets are ideal for developers to improve and iterate on their products. One class of technological innovation in the crypto space is the use of sharding to enhance a blockchain’s scalability. The fundamentals of sharding were covered in a prior research piece, so this piece will primarily focus on the recent performance and development of shard protocols.

Near protocol has had a relatively strong performance in TVL YTD, more so than its EVM counterpart, Aurora. This is peculiar, considering how the EVM-compatibility is a significant factor in increasing adoption.