The Blockchain is a new, disruptive technology for transacting, recording and distributing data across the global internet. It is completely decentralized, secure and not controlled by any centralized authority, private or public. While the blockchain industry strengthens its position every year, scalability remains one of its biggest challenges. For instance, today every node in the network has to process all the stored transactions, which slows down the whole operation and limits the blockchain’s capability to run at scale.
Solving Blockchain Scalability — A System-Level View
Current nascent problems of the blockchain are the same as of the Internet in its infancy. Innovators and entrepreneurs working to harness the power of the Third Wave (Splend’s Medium Post November 8, 2018) can look to the Second Wave or Internet Revolution where system-level integration of the Internet infrastructure became the solution for scalability issues. Well-defined, standardized, layered protocols allowed higher levels of integration (system-on-a-chip) with increased overall system performance. These layers were scaled appropriately to support billions of users. As a result, the Internet Revolution model is cylindrical in nature (Figure 1) where every layer is balanced. In this case, the system-level integration approach removed bottlenecks at each layer by efficiently mapping the algorithms and protocols into hardware and software.
Blockchain also needs similar systems view (Figure 1) with a balanced hardware-software approach to reach the mainstream.
Companies in this space are trying their hands at solving scalability by focusing on protocols and consensus layers (Figure 2). However, this still leaves the Network and other layers unresolved, leading to a “funnel” effect which throttles data speeds and performance.
How Splend Overcomes Blockchain Scalability Issues
To remove obstructions that bottleneck performance and scalability, we must look at every layer. The entire system has to be redefined from the ground up with standards and protocols that work in tandem with hardware. Companies like Splend can become effective partners in overcoming the blockchain’s scalability limitations by partitioning the functionality efficiently between software and hardware. Splend’s IBA™ technology is capable of scaling to billions of users and IoT devices worldwide, while guaranteeing almost instantaneous transaction speed. IBA™ will seamlessly adapt to new protocols and accommodate applications requiring deterministic response time and high transaction throughput.
The scalability solutions for blockchains are rapidly evolving. The Internet Revolution model has already shown that an integrated approach can be successful in dealing with scalability, and industry experts believe that such a holistic solution will also prevail with blockchain.
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