A blockchain developed by CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, in collaboration with the University of Sydney, has completed a global test on Amazon’s ubiquitous cloud computing network to process 30,000 transactions
As reported yesterday, the ‘Red Belly Blockchain’ – developed jointly by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the Concurrent System Research Group (CSRG) at the University of Sydney – was put to use in a successful trial on Amazon Web Services (AWS), a popular cloud infrastructure provider.
While the blockchain has previously been tested to scale substantially – up to 660,000 transactions per second – on a single localized network of 300 machines, the full scale of its trial on AWS has now been revealed.
Deployed across 1,000 virtual machines in 14 of 18 geographic regions serviced by AWS, “a benchmark was set by sending 30,000 transactions per second from different geographic regions, demonstrating an average transaction latency of three seconds with 1,000 replicas”, a CSIRO announcement confirmed.
The geographical locations of the nodes running the blockchain include North America, South America, Europe and the Asia Pacific (Sydney).
Fundamentally, the experiment was to showcase the Red Belly Blockchain’s scalability while retaining the technology’s core characteristics in security and speeds, the agency said. Their blockchain relies on a unique consensus mechanism that performs and scales without adhering to the ‘proof of work’ mechanism used by popular public blockchains like bitcoin and ethereum.
“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,” Dr Vincent Gramoli, senior researcher at Data61 and head of the university research group said.
He added:
“The deployment of Red Belly Blockchain on AWS shows the unique scalability and strength of the next generation ledger technology in a global context.”
Concurrently, the CSIRO is also part of a data consortium with technology giant IBM that is actively developing a large-scale, cross-industry blockchain platform dubbed the Australian National Blockchain (ANB). The nationwide blockchain platform will be powered by smart contracts.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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