Red belly blockchain proving to be super-fast Wednesday, 22 November 2017

Just like its serpentine namesake, the Australian Red Belly Blockchain performs better the larger it gets and while its bite is only for digital bits, it has caught up and overtaken its prey.

Software engineers at the University of Sydney who developed the Red Belly Blockchain have conducted global trials on the technology which has shown it can process financial transactions at twice the speed first anticipated.

Outperforming market leaders like VISA, the Red Belly Blockchain is being developed by researchers at the university’s School of Information Technologies, with the aim of eliminating common problems currently plaguing digital transactions. These include double spending or a ‘balance attack’.

Dr Vincent Gramoli, head of the Concurrent Systems Research Group, revealed that recent trials show the technology’s performance improves as it scales up.

“Our latest tests showed the Red Belly Blockchain can process more than 660,000 transactions per second on 300 machines in a single data centre,” he said.

“This … showed our blockchain achieved a performance of more than 440,000 transactions per second on 100 machines. In comparison, VISA’s network has a peak capacity of around 56,000 transactions.”

The Red Belly Blockchain has been tested on140 machines across 14 regions in Australia, Canada, UK, US, Germany, Brazil, Japan, India, South Korea and Singapore.

“Our results confirmed that our blockchain achieves better performance than existing technologies used by financial institutions even when the machines that have to collaboratively provide the service are located on different continents. We do not know of any other blockchain solution that can achieve this,” Dr Gramoli said.

The Red Belly Blockchain is being built to work in both public and private contexts, meaning that it could be used peer-to-peer on the internet as well as in an industrial environment which is restricted to certain users.

One of the benefits of the Red Belly Blockchain is its performance that scales without consuming much electricity. In this way it differs from proof-of-work blockchains. The Red Belly ensures the security of hundreds of thousands of transactions per second coming from a potentially unbounded number of clients, according to its developers.

Dr Gramoli revealed that the next stage of the Red Belly Blockchain will be made publicly available to all Internet users.

Read the 2017 Leader/Randomisation/Signature-free Byzantine consensus for consortium blockchains.

Read about blockchains and the Internet of Things.

 

Image source: Greg Wallis