In particular, for public blockchains as opposed to enterprise blockchains. The primary difference between public and enterprise blockchains, is critical to understanding the role of sharding in blockchains and cryptocurrencies. The value proposition is decidedly different for a public blockchain, which requires a much more nuanced, and advanced, engineering approach. Ethereum may be the public blockchain carrying the torch into sharding, but an entire class of new blockchain platforms has emerged as competition. Sharding blockchains is an area still under heavy active research and is an esoteric field at the edge of distributed computing.

Source: Forbes June 11, 2019 10:30 UTC