Graphical illustration the two stages which comprise the Qtum benchmarking tool… #1: Prepare: Generate enough UTXOs for benchmarking — #2: Send: Send prepared UTXOs to the node - Sourced via Github
In the fight for attention among the crypto media and community, it is exceptionally common for projects to boast competitive achievements pertaining to quantitative metrics in a bid to make headline news.
Transactions-per-second (or TPS) is just one of these and sits at the centre of an ongoing technological arms race to create the fastest engine for blockchain transaction speeds.
Whilst many bogus and otherwise unbelievable claims have been made by rivals, the transactions-per-second achieved by the QtumX blockchain (if the benchmark is to be believed) puts it far ahead of the ‘top tier’ chains.
(For the record: Bitcoin is estimated to be capable of processing just seven TPS, whilst Ripple can currently process approximately 1,000 TPS.)
The Need For Qtum Speed
“Three nodes are launched to form a blockchain network. Two of them are miners for generating new blocks. The other is to accept transactions from RPC and relay them to miners.” — Sourced via QtumX Medium
One of the latest companies to pitch its stake in the ‘TPS race’ is an enterprise-level blockchain called QtumX which, in a Medium post and press-release distributed yesterday, provided substantial evidence that collectively boasts how the team (eponymously named ‘Qtum’) has created a blockchain that can handle 10,000 TPS.
For the Qtum team, what their recorded result of 10,000 TPS represents is “that QtumX has a high performance” with functional results including immediate confirmation of transactions, upon being sent to the network “with low storage and network consumption.”
The blockchain will additionally implement a novel consensus mechanism, Proof of Authority, along with a proprietary ‘Scalable Consensus Algorithm’ (abbreviated as ‘SCAR’). The primary use case suggested by the team is DApps (blockchain compatible decentralized applications):
“Especially in business scenarios, where it will have great advantages.”
“Generated blocks and transactions are shown as follows. You can see that there are 5 blocks containing more than 10,000 transactions: height 1461, 1459, 1445, 1439, and 1433.” — Sourced via QtumX Medium
Why TPS Can Be Important
To put it bluntly: transaction speeds matter for the majority of blockchain based projects, especially those intending to operate on a global / enterprise level.
The ‘TPS race’ stemmed from the scalability debate spurred by low TPS blockchains like Bitcoin. When SegWit and subsequently the Lightning Network were deployed however, many of its problems disappeared. It threw into question just how indicative is TPS of the potential that a blockchain has to fulfill its duties no matter how large and demanding its audience is.
For payment providers the importance is paramount to the business, with the ideal service-model relying on immediacy of both inter and intra-banking transactions.
E-commerce possesses similar demands, and Logistics requires immediacy immensely: be it warehouse management, or the storage and transport of vital, sterile materials in the healthcare and chemicals sectors.
Regardless, ‘transactions-per-second’ is a significant metric when it comes to comparing blockchains to non-blockchain and centralized enterprise giants, such as major global payments processor Visa (which still blows all blockchain solutions out of the water with a reported 24,000 TPS).
Parallel Lines
‘Decentralized Governance Protocol’ is another unique feature. Captured from the Qtum DGP demo video.
We reached out to the Qtum team for comment, and received the following statement from Chief Information Officer (CIO) Mike Palencia regarding the testing procedures and how they accomplished the speeds recorded:
“The method was designed to simulate a real use case scenario. Three nodes were set up with QtumX nodes, one of those nodes was the “sender”.
This node sent a large number of transactions into the blockchain, these transactions were sent in parallel to optimize resources.
In a real use case scenario, you’d be looking at a similar implementation as one or more nodes can act as senders and these are accessible via an API which is linked to a mobile or web app.
The benchmark tool is open source and can be downloaded from our GitHub. Anyone can test and compare results.”
QtumX is to be compatible with both the Bitcoin UTXO structure as well as Ethereum Solidity smart contracts.