Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has revealed a long-term roadmap for ethereum's technical development, particularly addressing the issue of scalability, CoinDesk reported.

Speaking at Devcon, Buterin proposed “sharding” along with other technical changes to Ethereum. As storage costs are likely to increase exponentially with the expansion of the system, he highlighted the need for solutions that would help mitigate such costs.

"Scalability is probably problem number one [...] There’s a graveyard of systems that claim to solve the scalability problem but don't. It's a very significant and hard challenge. These are just known facts,” he said.

Buterin sees sharding as a probable solution to this issue. It involves partitioning data into subsets so that each node will have to store only a small part of the whole network. The underlying mechanism would ensure the accountability of the system and, if required, nodes could rely on other nodes for data. However, this also raises the issue that nodes should send correct information to other nodes.

Addressing these issues, Buterin proposed a new sharding infrastructure which would solve both scalability and governance. He proposed splitting Ethereum into different types of shards – the main shard comprising of the current Ethereum network, and other shards or “universes”.

According to Buterin, this mechanism would allow for more aggressive changes on the smaller shards, and more cautious changes on the main blockchain. This, in turn, will ensure the network’s stability, while giving room to developers to test new changes and move fast on the other shards.

"Other universes where all this stuff we’ve been working on these last few years can be rolled out much much faster,” he added.

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