First-Class Support for Sharded Blockchains
Many new blockchains are experimenting with sharding as a mechanism to increase transaction throughput. When designing Rosetta, we considered it critical to support sharded blockchains as first-class Rosetta citizens without bogging down the rosetta-specifications for blockchains that did not pursue sharding.
To support sharding, Rosetta introduces the idea of a sub-network and allows developers to specify a particular sub-network on any request to the Data API. This allows for very explicit querying of blockchain data across what may be a vast network of shards.