Sharding runs on the parallel processing power of multiple networked machines that split up the workload of verifying transactions. It automatically divides networks into smaller sections, or “shards,” each of which runs a smaller-scale consensus protocol.Processing in parallel, such a network is capable of churning out hundreds of transactions per second per shard, for a total of thousands of transactions per second.
As more nodes join, the network will become increasingly faster at validating transactions. Once such a network is as large as that of Ethereum, it will be able to handle so many transactions per second that it makes it faster and potentially cheaper than VISA.