Red Belly Blockchain achieves 30k txs/sec in global trial on AWS cloud

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) has completed a large-scale blockchain trial which demonstrated increased speed and energy efficiencies at a global scale.

CSIRO’s technology arm Data61, in collaboration with the Concurrent Systems Research Group at the University of Sydney, developed “Red Belly Blockchain” – an innovative platform which offers performance that scales without an equivalent increase in electricity consumption.

Red Belly Blockchain addresses three key issues that have plagued previous versions of blockchain technology. This includes environmental impact from significant energy use, the problem of double spending, and throughput.

The experiment was undertaken on Amazon Web Services' (AWS) global cloud infrastructure. It involved deploying Red Belly Blockchain on 1,000 virtual machines across 14 of AWS' 18 geographic regions, including North America, South America, Asia Pacific, and Europe. It showed the platform’s scalability without compromising on the transaction speeds and security.

“A benchmark was set by sending 30,000 transactions per second from different geographic regions, demonstrating an average transaction latency (or delay) of three seconds with 1,000 replicas (a machine that maintains a copy of the current state of the Blockchain and the balance of all accounts),” the release said.

According to the official release, two earlier experiments were conducted on AWS from July 2017 to May 2018, with one of them showing a throughput of 660,000 transactions per second across 300 machines in a single Availability Zone. However, the latest deployment on AWS' network tested Red Belly Blockchain's performance on a global scale.

“Real-world applications of blockchain have been struggling to get off the ground due to issues with energy consumption and complexities induced by the proof of work," Dr Vincent Gramoli, senior researcher at CSIRO's Data61 and head of Concurrent Systems Research Group at the University of Sydney said. "The deployment of Red Belly Blockchain on AWS shows the unique scalability and strength of the next generation ledger technology in a global context."