EOS.IO software supports deferred transactions that are planned to be executed in the future. This enables calculations to move to different shards and/or create long-running processes that continuously plan continuous transactions.
5.7 Context-free operations
Context-free operations only involve calculations that require transaction data, not the state of the blockchain. For example, signature verification is a calculation that only requires transaction data and signatures to determine the public key that signed the transaction. Signature verification is one of the most expensive single calculations among the calculations that must be performed on the blockchain, but since this calculation is context-independent, it can be executed concurrently.
Context-free operations are similar to other user operations, except that they cannot access the blockchain state to perform verification. This not only enables EOS.IO to concurrently handle all context-independent operations such as signature verification, but more importantly, it can achieve universal signature verification.
By supporting context free operation, scalability technologies such as Sharding, Raiden, Plasma, StateChannels, etc. become more concurrent and practical. This kind of development achieves efficient inter-blockchain communication and potentially unlimited scalability.