Status, the developer of decentralized applications and mobile clients based on Ethereum (ETH) network, announced the development of Nimbus, a client focused on the Ethereum sharding protocol.
Written in the lightweight Nim programming language, Nimbus, still under development, proposes a solution for sharding implementation over the next two years. Specifically, Nimbus is focused on the application of the Ethereum (ETH) sharding protocol in mobile devices with restricted resources and tools with IoT (Internet of Things) properties.
The client’s design is modular, as the goal is to get the sharding node to work quickly and correctly in systems known as “embedded” and with smartphones of lower ranges since mobile devices with restricted resources are the most common according to research conducted by Status.
Sharding, a protocol based on a strategy to improve Ethereum (ETH) scalability, proposes to solve network congestion by segmenting it and dividing the validation of its transactions between different groups of nodes.
Nimbus is the first mobile client that supports Ethereum (ETH) sharding in the web3.js code repository
By implementing sharding in Ethereum (ETH) main blockchain, a beacon chain is formed that will function as a notary and after a certain number of blocks, will add the signature to the main blockchain. This way, the main chain houses all the information, but the shard nodes will not need to store the entire blockchain data.
At the moment, Nimbus is the first mobile client capable of supporting sharding in the web3.js code repository. A group of experts leads this development under a “permissive” license, but with patent protection, Apache 2.0 and MIT.
The release of the client that develops Status depends on the sharding protocol finally being included in Ethereum’s primary network. Therefore, the Nimbus roadmap calls for its development to culminate in the last quarter of 2019, with the launch of the customer.
Status is working on the development of this protocol while researching the implementation of the sharding protocol in the different processes that Ethereum’s network goes through, such as the implementation of Casper and Swarm, focusing on the features required to run shard nodes on mobile devices.
