Blockchain Sharding & Throughput Simulator

Network Sharding

Shard count 4

Block size (tx / block) 200

Block time 4.0s

Cross-shard tx share 20%

Live Throughput

Effective TPS

Ideal TPS (no penalty)

Avg confirm latency

0 s

Cross-shard overhead

Blocks produced (all shards)

Legend

Intra-shard transaction Cross-shard transaction (2-phase) Shard block (pulses on commit)

How it works

Sharding splits a blockchain's validator set into N independent shards, each producing its own blocks in parallel instead of one global chain processing every transaction serially. If a single chain confirms B transactions every block time T, splitting into N shards raises the ceiling to:

TPS_ideal = N × B / T

But a fraction x of real transactions touch two accounts living on different shards (e.g. a token transfer between users on shard 2 and shard 5). A cross-shard transaction cannot be finalised by one shard alone — it needs a two-phase commit: the source shard locks/confirms first, then a relay message lets the destination shard confirm, roughly doubling that transaction's latency and consuming block space on two shards instead of one. Modelling that overhead:

TPS_effective = TPS_ideal × (1 − x × p)
Avg latency  = (1 − x) × T + x × 2T = T × (1 + x)

where p (here 0.6) is the extra capacity a cross-shard transaction consumes versus a normal one. This is why real sharded systems (Ethereum's danksharding roadmap, Zilliqa, Near) invest heavily in minimising cross-shard traffic — every cross-shard transaction gives back some of the parallelism sharding bought in the first place, and pushing shard count up without also reducing cross-shard load causes throughput to plateau instead of scaling linearly.

Shard count — more parallel chains, higher ideal ceiling, but each shard needs its own validator quorum.
Block size / block time — sets each shard's base throughput B/T.
Cross-shard share — the fraction of transactions needing the 2-phase commit shown in gold, crossing between shard rings via the central relay.

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