Open-source project Qtum representatives claim that their enterprise blockchain dubbed ‘QtumX’ can accommodate “more than 10,000” transactions per second (TPS), according to a press release recently shared with Cointelegraph.
With yet another player being added to the scalability race, it makes sense to look back and see how the main blockchains and cryptocurrencies stand in regard to TPS — and whether their numbers are actually authentic.
Transaction speed: How important is it? Scalability is one of cryptocurrencies’ main issues, especially when it comes to the older coins. In fact, one of the first public comments on Bitcoin’s ( BTC ) white paper opened with the following line: “We very, very much need such a system, but the way I understand your proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size.”
Ten years on, the problem still persists — the original blockchain can reportedly process only around seven TPS, which eventually led to dire consequences. At the end of 2017, Bitcoin users had to pay around $28 in fees so their transactions wouldn’t take days to complete.
Those problems resulted in a hard fork and a new Bitcoin-based currency, Bitcoin Cash ( BCH ), which moved on to increase the maximum block size up to eight megabytes from just one.
Many other, newer cryptocurrencies have since attempted to create their own blockchains, which are allegedly faster and cheaper. Their primary goal was often to beat the ultimate crypto nemesis, the centralized global payment system Visa , which can process 24,000 TPS , according to the IBM study conducted back in 2010. Many blockchains have since surpassed that point during their scalability race, but only on paper.
It is important to recognize that while TPS, confirmation time and scalability in general might be important for the long-awaited mass adoption to come, they are not the only criteria. Many cryptocurrencies claim to have high TPS performance these days, but the transaction speed is often dependable and is generally hard to measure — especially with real-time traffic instead of test networks, with their ideal conditions in terms of latency. As a result, many of the claimed TPS are different from their actual value.
Besides, even with a high TPS, the demand might not be there. This has been clearly visualized on the Txstreet website , where every transaction is pictured as a person, and they fill up buses that represent the block space of BTC and BCH. BCH has more buses — as its block size is bigger — but few passengers to fill them.
On contrary, while there are just two buses for BTC, they fill quickly, and a lot of people are left crowded on the pavement, waiting to hop on the next block. Even the above mentioned Visa, which has the capacity to run at 24,000 TPS , reportedly does only 2,000 TPS on average , and up to 4,000 during peak hours — in other words, it doesn’t need more at this point.
Transaction Speed of Various Blockchains More Qtum Claimed TPS capacity: 10,000
Qtum developers recently ran the blockchain’s benchmark on Amazon EC2 virtual server and, according to its own estimations , QtumX “is able to handle more than 10,000 TPS.” They stress that, due to the high speed, transactions are supposedly confirmed as soon as they are sent to the network.
It is important to note that QtumX has not been audited by third parties, and it is therefore impossible to confirm the authenticity of Qtum’s press release at this point. Similar to QtumX is Aelf, another business-oriented blockchain solution, whose development team reported achieving as many as 15,000 TPS during the initial test run in August 2018..
