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The Future of Blockchain Series
The Blockchain Scalability Problem & the Race for Visa-Like Transaction Speed
Yes, blockchain has a scalability problem. Here’s what it is, and here’s what people are doing to solve it.
The battle for a scalable solution is the blockchain’s moon race. Bitcoin processes 4.6 transactions per second. Visa does around 1,700 transactions per second on average (based on a calculation derived from the official claim of over 150 million transactions per day). The potential for adoption is there but is bottlenecked currently by scalability.
A study published by Tata Communications in 2018 showed that 44% of organizations in its survey are adopting blockchain, but also alludes to the universal problems that arise from deploying new technologies. From an architectural level, the unsolved problem of scalability is emerging as a bottleneck to blockchain adoption and practical applications.
As Deloitte Insights puts it, “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.” The world received a taste of the scalability problems in 2017 and 2018: severe transfer…
