A brief architecture comparison of Layer 1 blockchains

Most of the notable next-generation blockchain projects plan to scale with a parallelized scaling architecture. In the case of Ethereum 2.0 and NEAR, this is sharding, while in the context of Polkadot and Cosmos it’s more often referred to as interoperability between blockchains.

From the top-down view, each of these solutions looks quite similar. Transactions are processed with separate sets of validators, and there is some method of communication between different environments. This is the same for a shard on Ethereum 2.0 and an application-specific chain on Cosmos.