Blockchain sharding

TON Blockchain is a collection of blockchains that are called workchains. Each workchain might have different formats of account addresses, formats of transactions, and different virtual machines for smart contracts.

TON Blockchain dynamically splits workchains into halves when the transaction rate is above the threshold, and merges them when it decreases below the threshold. This is called Infinite Sharding Paradigm. Sharding is the general concept used to split the load into several parts, to ease requirements on a single computing element of some system.

Each account is the sole citizen of its corresponding blockchain, accountchain. Each accountchain describes the state and state transitions of only one account. An accountchain is a virtual concept used in explanations.

Regularly creating empty blocks for rarely updated accountchains would be too expensive. To reduce the cost, accountchains are grouped into shardchains, where each block is a collection of blocks of accountchains that have been assigned to this shard.