A blockchain system developed by Australia’s national science agency (CSIRO) and Sydney University claims to have set a benchmark of 30,000 transactions per second during a test on Amazon Cloud, according to CSIRO’s Tuesday, September 25 press release.
The technology arm of CSIRO, Data61, and the Concurrent Systems Research Group at the University of Sydney created Red Belly Blockchain as a “graduate” from CSIRO’s Pre-accelerator program ON prime.
CSIRO and the Concurrent Systems Research Group announced the first outcome of its experiment held on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure. Red Belly Blockchain was tested on 1,000 machines in 18 regions, including North and South Americas, Australia, and Europe.
As per the CSIRO report, Red Belly Blockchain was reportedly able to operate 30,000 transactions per second from different locations, showing an average transaction delay of three seconds.
Bitcoin (BTC) infrastructure normally scales up to eight transactions per second, according to Blockchain’s statistics for September. Ethereum (ETH) blockchain capability is up to 15 transactions per second; however, its creator Vitalik Buterin plans to scale it up to 500 using ZK-SNARK to mass-validate transactions.
According to a report released by CSIRO back in July, Red Belly Blockchain uses byzantine consensus — an algorithm that completes transactions without proof-of-work (PoW) and thus without an increase in energy consumption.
Dr Vincent Gramoli, senior researcher at CSIRO and head of the research group at the University of Sydney, noted that the current problems with “real-world applications of blockchain” include “issues with energy consumption and complexities induced by the proof of work.”
According to the CSIRO release, this is not the first time that Red Belly Blockchain has been tested on Amazon Cloud. During experiments between July 2017 and May 2018, one test showed 660,000 transactions per second on 300 machines. However, all of them were in a single Availability Zone.
Australia’s securities exchange, which has been working to implement blockchain as of December 2017 to replace its current system for processing equity transactions, said in September it would delay the transition for six months.
More recently, Australian real estate firm Vicinity announced plans this week to trial a blockchain solution for its energy network in partnership with energy tech company Power Ledger.