A network is only as strong as its weakest shard

From helpnetsecurity.com

Blockchain, a nascent technology, has enterprises globally enamored with the promise it holds to fundamentally turn everything from how we interact, transact, store, and manage data on its head. While the technology’s immutable nature and democratized architecture do have the potential to truly disrupt the world as we know it, there is currently no blockchain capable of truly unlocking the technology’s true potential let alone monetizing it.

The reason for this is blockchain continues to be held back by certain limitations – primarily of speed and scale. We know that Bitcoin and Ethereum average about 7 to 15 transactions per second (tps) respectively, nowhere near acceptable rates needed for mainstream applications like the Visa network, which runs at roughly 60,000 transactions per second(tps) or Nasdaq that processes at transaction throughputs of 500,000 tps. To overcome these challenges, many of the blockchains today are resorting to a concept borrowed from database architecture called sharding.