The Blockchain Scalability Problem & the Race for Visa-Like Transaction Speed

The battle for a scalable solution is the blockchain’s moon race. Bitcoin processes 4.6 transactions per second. Visa does around <a href="https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business-tools/retail.html" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">1,700 transactions per second on average</a> (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 <a href="https://www.tatacommunications.com/press-release/tata-communications-discovers-digital-transformation-disparity-in-new-study/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">showed that 44% of organizations in its survey are adopting blockchain</a>, 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. <a href="https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/focus/signals-for-strategists/value-of-blockchain-applications-interoperability.html" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">As Deloitte Insights puts it</a>, “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 <a href="https://www.newsbtc.com/2018/01/07/another-weekend-full-delayed-bitcoin-transactions/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">transfer delays and high fees on the Bitcoin network</a>, and the notorious <a href="https://qz.com/1145833/cryptokitties-is-causing-ethereum-network-congestion/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Cryptokitties app that congested the Ethereum blockchain network</a> (a network that thousands of decentralized applications rely on). <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/the-blockchain-scalability-problem-the-race-for-visa-like-transaction-speed-5cce48f9d44">Learn More</a>