How fast can a blockchain be? ‘Webspeed’ says the Internet Computer
Remember the days of slow internet connections? When you would surf a website and that “Loading” bar would just go on and on. Those few seconds or minutes were so frustrating, one felt like just breaking the computer.
Thanks to 4G and now 5G and we are living in a world where we expect websites and apps to load and respond to our commands in milliseconds. Even actions that need verifications like money transfers and ticket bookings happen at the speed of a click. The internet world seems almost perfect.
And then, the world says hello to the blockchain Smart Contract revolution, and suddenly the problems of large organizations with centralized control start becoming obvious. Everything from banking to social media, webservices to utility apps, all facing transparency & trust issues. It started with Defi (Decentralized Finance), then store of values assets like Art NFTs, gaming and now even Social Media apps are slowly but steadily moving towards a decentralized future.
However, most blockchain protocols are facing scaling issues which are preventing mass adoption. A Deloitte Insights report says this on barriers to the adoption of blockchain technology:
One major reason: as a means of processing transactions, blockchain-based systems are comparatively slow. Blockchain’s sluggish transaction speed is a major concern for enterprises that depend on high-performance legacy transaction processing systems
DeFi has found a home on the Ethereum Blockchain, because for high value transactions, where users don’t mind compromising speed. Other blockchains like Solana, Cardano, Avalanche etc are trying to solve scaling, but usually they are at the cost of Security, one of the biggest pillars of blockchain technology.
For mass adoption, the consumer experience needs to be the same at scale and the same as their internet surfing experience when it comes to speed. And here is where Webspeed becomes an important concept.
Webspeed means giving consumers of dApps the performance they expect of apps hosted on centralized cloud (Azure, AWS, IBM, Google Cloud, etc), which is currently not the case for decentralized blockchains.
A recent study done by Coincodex compares the Top 6 Layer 1 blockchains on various parameters, speed being one of them
To give it context, Visa does around 1,700 transactions per second (TPS) on average (based on a calculation derived from the official claim of over 150 million transactions per day), whereas Etheruem does 15–20 TPS which results in an action on the chain getting completed in 14 minutes. Even for Solana while theTPS is 2000–3000 TPS, but it takes 21–46 seconds for transaction finality.
Imagine if Instagram or Twitter were built on these, it would mean waiting for 14 minutes or even 30–60 seconds every time you take an action like posting, commenting, searching.Takes us back to the slow internet experience days.
The Internet Computer is the only blockchain protocol that is really fast, with a TPS of 11500 and transaction finality of 1 second.
However, Webspeed is a wider concept than just TPS or Transaction Finality, so to understand what it is let’s look at IC Webspeed from two points of views:
1. From the point of view of an app user
From the point of view of a user of a dApp, the IC is “fast” enough that app consumers would have no idea that it runs with a blockchain as the backend. It would be comparable to services running on centralized services (Azure or IBM or AWS).
This means that while it would be extremely tricky to “build Airbnb web app on (traditional) smart contracts” because of the slow user experience, developers can create “Airbnb dApp on IC canisters”.
That is how apps like OpenChat, DSCVR, Distrikt can provide a seamless user experience.
2. From the point of view of an app developer:
There are two relevant factors:
a. How fast can an app READ data from a backend on the IC — Apps can make query calls to canisters, so it can read data in less than a second
b. How fast can an app WRITE data to a backend on the IC — Apps can make update calls, which go through consensus . The whole process is done within 2–5 seconds currently and is constantly decreasing.
So if you are a strong believer in Web3 and decentralization, ICP is the only blockchain today that is providing Webspeed along with the benefits of smartcontracts. Integrated with Reverse Gas Model (0 transaction cost to the user) — it makes user adoption very easy by removing friction of dApp adoption (which is currently Gas Fee based for Users).
The next revolution of Web3 will be dApps which need to deal with large number of files like decentralised Social Media platforms, Email services, Gaming, services like Uber and AirBnb. These cannot compromise user experience to scale up, and therefore should be built on the Internet Computer.
It’s truly an exciting time to be in this space to see how the next revolution of dApps happen on the ICP.
