{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,11]],"date-time":"2026-04-11T14:51:03Z","timestamp":1775919063813,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":92,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"10","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,21]],"date-time":"2025-10-21T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1761004800000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/100020173","name":"Universiti Teknologi Brunei","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","id":[{"id":"10.13039\/100020173","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"crossref"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Future Internet"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Blockchain technology, originally designed as a secure and immutable ledger, has expanded its applications across various domains. However, its scalability remains a fundamental bottleneck, limiting throughput, specifically Transactions Per Second (TPS) and increasing confirmation latency. Among the many proposed solutions, sharding has emerged as a promising Layer 1 approach by partitioning blockchain networks into smaller, parallelized components, significantly enhancing processing efficiency while maintaining decentralization and security. In this paper, we have conducted a systematic literature review, resulting in a comprehensive review of sharding. We provide a detailed comparative analysis of various sharding approaches and emerging AI-assisted sharding approaches, assessing their effectiveness in improving TPS and reducing latency. Notably, our review is the first to incorporate and examine the standardization efforts of the ITU-T and ETSI, with a particular focus on activities related to blockchain sharding. Integrating these standardization activities allows us to bridge the gap between academic research and practical standardization in blockchain sharding, thereby enhancing the relevance and applicability of our review. Additionally, we highlight the existing research gaps, discuss critical challenges such as security risks and inter-shard communication inefficiencies, and provide insightful future research directions. Our work serves as a foundational reference for researchers and practitioners aiming to optimize blockchain scalability through sharding, contributing to the development of more efficient, secure, and high-performance decentralized networks. Our comparative synthesis further highlights that while Bitcoin and Ethereum remain limited to 7\u201315 TPS with long confirmation delays, sharding-based systems such as Elastico and OmniLedger have reported significant throughput improvements, demonstrating sharding\u2019s clear advantage over traditional Layer 1 enhancements. In contrast to other state-of-the-art scalability techniques such as block size modification, consensus optimization, and DAG-based architectures, sharding consistently achieves higher transaction throughput and lower latency, indicating its position as one of the most effective Layer 1 solutions for improving blockchain scalability.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/fi17100481","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,21]],"date-time":"2025-10-21T14:53:19Z","timestamp":1761058399000},"page":"481","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":2,"title":["A Review on Blockchain Sharding for Improving Scalability"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"17","author":[{"given":"Mahran","family":"Morsidi","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computing and Informatics, Universiti Teknologi Brunei, Jalan Tungku Link, Gadong BE 1410, Brunei"}]},{"given":"Sharul","family":"Tajuddin","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computing and Informatics, Universiti Teknologi Brunei, Jalan Tungku Link, Gadong BE 1410, Brunei"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7453-5268","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"S. H. Shah","family":"Newaz","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computing and Informatics, Universiti Teknologi Brunei, Jalan Tungku Link, Gadong BE 1410, Brunei"}]},{"given":"Ravi Kumar","family":"Patchmuthu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computing and Informatics, Universiti Teknologi Brunei, Jalan Tungku Link, Gadong BE 1410, Brunei"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-2155-5553","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Gyu Myoung","family":"Lee","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer Science and Mathematics, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool L3 3AF, UK"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,21]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Haber, S., and Stornetta, W.S. (1991). How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document. 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