Home / Archive / This Sydney Uni Blockchain Claims to Process 400,000 Transactions/Sec; 7X of Visa, 57,000x of Bitcoin

This Sydney Uni Blockchain Claims to Process 400,000 Transactions/Sec; 7X of Visa, 57,000x of Bitcoin

Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:57 PM
Benjamin Vitáris
Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:57 PM

Researchers at Australia’s University of Sydney (USYD) are currently developing a new model of blockchain, which can, by their metrics, process 440,000 transactions per second. The participants of the project believe the new system has a potential for revolutionizing the global economy.

The new blockchain tech is named after the Oceanian country’s snake, and is developed and researched by the university’s School of Information Technologies. According to the researchers, the new technology would allow an almost instantaneous procession of cryptocurrency transactions in addition to being secure. Compared to Visa’s network, which can process approximately 56,000 transactions per second, the project members of the Red Belly Blockchain claim their system has the best performance. The bitcoin network, which also has limitations regarding the supply (21 million), can handle a relatively meager seven transactions per second. The Ethereum blockchain has a limitation of 20 transactions per second. PayPal, the leader in (fiat currency) internet payments, claimed in 2015 the company’s system processes 450 payments  every second.

“The Red Belly Blockchain offers unprecedented throughput of more than 400 thousands transactions per second on 100 machines. Its safety aspect is of invaluable importance for critical industries, like banking, and offer performance that scales horizontally,” the researchers write on the project’s site.

Researchers at the USYD stated the Red Belly Blockchain is the first blockchain network, which is built in both public and private contexts. This would allow the peer-to-peer exchange of data but will also have a feature for the industrial environment allowing connection to certain users.

“As opposed to mainstream public blockchains, ours is not subject to double spending — when an individual successfully spends their money more than once — because its chain of blocks never forks,” USYD academic Dr. Vincent Gramoli, head of the research at the Concurrent Systems Research Group – the company developing the Red Belly Blockchain -, said in a statement .

According to Gramoli, the Red Belly Blockchain, by scaling horizontally, can avoid common issues surrounding other blockchain techs, such as forking. Forking is a process when the blockchain starts to diverge into two or more potential paths forward.

“The absence of forks means there is no need for any number of confirmations. A transaction in a block is there for good,” the researchers write on their site.

“As opposed to consortium blockchains, it can treat hundreds of thousands of transactions per second coming from a potentially unbounded number of clients. It offers a performance that scales horizontally, which ensures the security of transactions,” Gramoli said.

The next step for the Red Belly Blockchain would be to develop a recommendation system, which would automate the selection of participants of a consensus instance, which the university believes will ensure the security of their blockchain technology.

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