Decentralized systems in general (and blockchains, in particular) hold great promise for solving hard social and financial challenges, such as: trustless store and mobility of value, autonomous organizations, programmable money and smart contracts, yet today's technologies aren't capable of handling such scale (e.g., Visa's 2500 TPS vs. Bitcoin's 3.3 TPS or Ethereum's 15 TPS).

In this talk, I'll give an overview of some modern scaling approaches. We'll discuss the current state of blockchain technologies and what they're lacking and analyze leading scaling approaches, such as: sharding (e.g., plasma constructs), L2 solutions (e.g., state channels), and "alternative" consensus algorithms.