The one issue I've been thinking about Blockchain is scalability. I see that the execution time of API calls (transactions) is slower than with legacy applications. So in the coming years, if Blockchain is adopted globally and there are requirements to mine thousands of transactions (probably more than this) per second, how does the Ethereum community plan to handle this situation?

If this question is already answered then please point me to the answer, I couldn't find it.


Right now, the current Ethereum proof-of-work (PoW) system involves a single miner verifying each block (but not always the same miner); this puts a hard limit on the number of transactions that can be included in each block: the number of transactions the miner's node can process for inclusion in the block. However, there are plans to distribute the processing for transactions so that different nodes can handle different transactions; this distribution of verification is known as sharding and potential Ethereum implementations are described here: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQs.

Not only can the volume of transactions (throughput) increase, but the delay (latency) can be reduced through the use of the proposed proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism.

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