In September 2018, Vlad Zamfir along with several other developers coded up a successful proof-of-concept for heterogeneous sharding at the ethereum hackathon EthBerlin. Sharding, which is part of the Eth2 roadmap, means that the blockchain data would be distributed among multiple virtual machines. Conceptualised by Vlad Zamfir himself, heterogeneous sharding goes further, allowing these virtual machines (shards) to have different execution features whilst still being able to communicate with each other. Vlad’s Cryptograph is a representation of what heterogeneous sharding would be able to bring to the Ethereum blockchain: a distributed blockchain where execution methods can differ but the state transition that happens as a result of the execution follows the same specifications. His hand-drawn equation and its proof-of-concept are regarded as a milestone for sharding, and symbolise what the Ethereum blockchain could become in the future. In Vlad’s own words: “It prevents the cross-shard atomicity failure, or more specifically, it prevents finalization of cross-shard atomicity failure, so it will never be that a ‘send’ is finalized and a ‘not received’ is finalized.”

Vlad Zamfir is a researcher of cryptoeconomics and consensus protocols. He is a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation and has been doing a lot of essential work on scaling Ethereum as it moves from its proof of work consensus based system to a proof of stake system. Self-identifying as an “absurdist” and a “troll” on his Twitter profile, he often engages in heated debates around blockchain governance, arguing that if people go down the wrong path in building these networks it could end up creating tyrannical systems rather than liberative ones.

Learn more about Vlad Zamfir:
https://cointelegraph.com/top-people-in-crypto-and-blockchain/vlad-zamfir
https://twitter.com/VladZamfir