FAQ

- **What is sharding?**

Sharding is about dividing the workload up into pieces for the purpose of horizontal scaling. There are many ways to handle sharding in SQL databases, but sharding for blockchains is an emerging field. The closest thing we have are the altcoins ecosystem, but this isn't very good because all the altcoins are their own silos with no good way to interoperate except via centralized exchanges, or tricks like hashlocked transactions (like the Lightning Network), which have their own benefits and drawbacks.

- **How does Cosmos do sharding?**

Cosmos implements sharding using zones. It's a sharding solution that preserves the sovereignty of the shard as a self-governing and self-validating system. The Cosmos Hub doesn't care about the internal state of an Cosmos zone -- rather, all that matters to the Cosmos Hub is what the zone explicitly communicates to the Cosmos Hub via IBC packets.

- **What's an IBC packet?**

IBC packets are packets of data that one blockchain wishes to send to another blockchain. But instead of literally sending a packet of bytes via the TCP/IP or UDP/IP protocol (which is designed for singular, physical, machines), IBC packets

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