CSIRO and the University of Sydney's Red Belly Blockchain breaks new ground for speed

The University of Sydney and CSIRO’s Data61 say they have successfully created a blockchain that can process a mass amount of transactions significantly more quickly than public blockchains, such as the one behind bitcoin.

New trials of the Red Belly Blockchain run on Amazon Web Services infrastructure have shown an average transaction delay of only three seconds and a throughput of 30,000 transactions per second.

In comparison, bitcoin processes only three to seven transactions per second and as of August had an average confirmation time for a transaction of 10-30 minutes (during peak trading periods in January this has reached as high as almost 3000 minutes per transaction), according to Blockchain.com.

The University of Sydney’s Dr Vincent Gramoli, who heads up the Concurrent Systems Research Group developing the blockchain and also works for Data61, said Red Belly Blockchain was the result of two years of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars in research grants.

“So far, blockchain had not shown that it could scale and we wanted to demonstrate that a blockchain technology could scale in the number of participating machines and have performance maintained or improved with an increasing number of participants,” he said.

Dr Gramoli said Red Belly Blockchain was based on a new blockchain “system” which fits between the two current models of public blockchains and consortium blockchains.

Source: CSIRO and the University of Sydney’s Red Belly Blockchain breaks new ground for speed | afr.com