Researchers from the University of Sydney’s School of Information Technologies are developing a superfast blockchain technology that they believe has the potential to make bitcoin-based transactions possible around the world.
A blockchain is a virtual public ledger that processes and records transactions. Blockchain is the underlying technology for bitcoin, the cryptocurrency, but bitcoin hasn’t taken off as a payment system due to its slow speed.
Bitcoin transactions, on average, take about 30-45 minutes to complete — although they have been known to take several hours if there is heavy traffic on the bitcoin network. The bitcoin network blockchain operates at approximately seven transactions per second — a snail’s pace in comparison to the VISA network’s 56,000 transactions per second.
But even VISA’s record of 56,000 transactions per second pales in comparison to the speed of the Red Belly Blockchain. “In recent testing, our blockchain achieved the best performance we have seen so far – with more than 440,000 transactions per second on 100 machines,” said Dr. Vincent Gramoli, head of the university’s Concurrent Systems Research Group that’s developing the technology, in a statement.
How was this speed accomplished? “We adopted a different approach from the existing blockchains,” Gramoli told The University Network (TUN). “We discovered that the consensus problem that blockchain needed to solve was actually different from the Byzantine consensus problems the distributed computing community had been working on for more than 30 years, this is why we called it the ‘Blockchain consensus’. We then researched the most efficient solution we could find to this particular problem rather than adopting an off-the-shelf solution that was targeting a different problem.”
The Red Belly Blockchain is also being developed to prevent double spending, which may occur when a bug causes the blockchain to “fork” or split into different paths, through the use of a recommendation system that would automatically select the participants in a consensus instance. “The ‘Blockchain consensus’ problem prevents fork by definition: it makes computers agree on a unique block at any index, hence they agree on a single branch, the ‘chain’ of block,” Gramoli told TUN.
The technology is expected to work in industrial environments and peer-to-peer transactions.
The goal of the new blockchain technology, Gramoli told TUN, is “combining efficiency and security in modern payment systems.”
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