Australia’s national science agency and researchers at the University of Sydney say a company they incubated, Red Belly Blockchain, has achieved 30 000 transactions per second on a global blockchain of 1000 nodes created using Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) global cloud infrastructure.
The agency, CSIRO’s Data61, and Concurrent Systems Research Group say that Red Belly Blockchain’s service has overcome issues of both high energy consumption in proof-of-work blockchain systems and the double-spend problem proof-of-work prevents.
The 30 000 transactions were reportedly transmitted across 14 of 18 geographic regions covered by Amazon Web Services, including North America,South America, Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Europe, with an average latency of 3 seconds per transaction:
“This is comparable to the latency obtained during a test in 2017 with only 260 replicas located in a single region. In comparison, mainstream blockchain technologies need minutes, with other technologies typically processing less than 20 transactions per second.”
Since the release of Bitcoin in 2009, researchers and private firms have been seeking ways to improve upon private data and payment systems by incorporating features of the Bitcoin system, which settles all transactions across thousands of nodes globally, each of which maintains an immutable copy of the entire system’s data history.
But numerous projects have run into problems trying to adapt Bitcoin technology to entirely different contexts, namely private:
“Real-world applications of blockchain have been struggling to get off the ground due to issues with energy consumption and complexities induced by the proof of work,” said Dr Vincent Gramoli, senior researcher at CSIRO’s Data61 and head of Concurrent Systems Research Group at the University of Sydney.
Proof-of-work is an energy-intensive method of mathematically sealing every piece of data added to blocks in a process of layered encryption.
Bitcoin uses this system to automate the so-called “middleman” in payment systems to create a transaction network dependent on no central control.
Transactions are verified automatically by mathematical consensus by Bitcoin’s software, but private systems run by trusted individuals have no need to use such a cumbersome method of validation, critics say.
According to the release, “Red Belly Blockchain differs from these (public) blockchains as it is underpinned by a unique algorithm and offers performance that scales without an equivalent increase in electricity consumption.”
Bitcoiners take issue with the use of the term “blockchain” to describe what they say are really “distributed ledger” systems, and the Red Belly Blockchain release uses both terms, as in, “The deployment of Red Belly Blockchain on AWS shows the unique scalability and strength of the next generation ledger technology in a global context.”
Simon Elisha of AWS Cloud Services Australia and New Zealand says his company’s global cloud computing system, “provides innovative organisations of all kinds with a global network of compute power, allowing organisations like Red Belly Blockchain to quickly conduct large-scale experiments that break new ground.”
Red Belly Blockchain is a projected created in CSIRO’s ON Prime Pre-accelerator Program, “which aided in providing early business model development for the startup.”