New trials from the University of Sydney’s Red Belly Blockchain have found that it can process financial transactions 50 times faster than originally thought, making it quicker than Visa for worldwide payments.
Back in July, it was initially reported that researchers at the university had developed a new model of blockchain that could process 440,000 transactions per second on 100 machines. This is compared to Visa’s network, which can process 56,000 transactions per second. Bitcoin is limited to around seven per second whereas the ethereum blockchain can process 20.
These latest results from the university show that the technology’s performance improves as it scales up, according to an announcement from the university.
Dr. Vincent Gramoli, who heads the Concurrent Systems Research Group developing the blockchain, said:
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. This is a notable improvement from our tests earlier in the year, which showed our blockchain achieved a performance of more than 440,000 transactions per second on 100 machines.
The test results were taken from 14 different locations ranging from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the U.K., and the U.S. Ten machines took part in the testing of each area.
Dr. Gramoli added that he doesn’t know of any other blockchain that can achieve these same results.
Our results confirmed that our blockchain achieves better performance than existing technologies used by financial institutions – including Visa – even when the machines that have to collaboratively provide the service are located in different continents.
The Red Belly Blockchain is being built to prevent problems currently facing digital currencies such as double spending. It is different from proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains in that it offers a performance that scales without consuming much electricity.
The next stage for the Red Belly Blockchain is to make it available to all Internet users.