The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), an Australian federal science agency, has claimed a breakthrough following a global test on a blockchain network.
The Red Belly blockchain, developed by CSIRO’s technology arm Data61 and the Concurrent Systems Research Group (CSRG) from the University of Sydney, was said to have reached a benchmark of 30,000 transactions per second after it was tested across 1,000 nodes in 14 countries throughout the Americas, the Asia-Pacific, and Europe.
Solves issue of scalability
CSIRO said the transactions were sent with an average latency of three seconds and were the agency’s first blockchain test in a global setting.
The purpose of the network is to solve a common issue of scalability among major blockchains that currently use a proof-of-work mechanism to operate.
The alternative, published in a paper from CSIRO and the University of Sydney, uses a different algorithm known as a deterministic byzantine consensus, which allows a blockchain network to complete transactions after receiving a threshold of messages instead of having to wait for confirmations from nodes that are slow.
Dr Vincent Gramoli, a senior Data61 researcher and head of the CSRG, said at the moment, real-world applications of blockchain had been “struggling to get off the ground” due to issues surrounding energy consumption and the complexities of the proof-of-work mechanism.
He added that the deployment of Red Belly on the Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure, on which the test was conducted, “shows the unique scalability and strength of the next generation ledger technology in a global context”.
CSIRO is also currently working in partnership with US computing firm IBM Corp (NYSE:IBM) to create what has been called the Australia National Blockchain.