Microchain

A microchain is a small, lightweight chain of blocks dedicated to a single user, application or narrow task, designed to run in parallel with many others rather than sharing one global ledger. The aim is scalability: if each account or app has its own chain, activity on one does not slow down the rest. The Linera project, for example, gives each user their own microchain, with a common set of validators processing all of them and cross-chain messages linking them. The idea is related to appchains, which give each application its own blockchain, to sharding, which splits one network into parallel parts, and to sidechains. The term has no single standard definition, and some earlier projects used "microchain" as a brand name, so its meaning depends on the source. Also see multi-chain.