Performance
TPS (Transactions Per Second) is also called "system throughput", that is, "the number of transactions that the system can process per second". The biggest problem with current blockchains is performance. The following figure shows the single-day maximum transaction volume (data before 2019/10/1) of some public chains. The data comes from https://tokenview.com/：
| Name | Data date | Trading volume | TPS | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BitCoin | 2017/12/14 | 490644 | 5.67875 | The theoretical limit is 7 |
| Ethereum | 2018/01/04 | 1349890 | 15.6237 | Waiting for the implementation of sharding technology |
| TRON | 2019/07/22 | 5280790 | 61.1203 | |
| EOS | 2018/11/10 | 11557159 | 133.7634 | Claimed to be over a million |
| Conflux | Mainnet is not online | 3000-6000 | Claimed up to 6000 |
According to statistics, for an ordinary computer with 13Mbps Internet connection, E5-1620@3.5GHz 4Core CPU, 16G memory, 512G SSD hard disk (250MB/s), the theoretical upper limit of TPS caused by network bandwidth is about 7,000 TPS The theoretical upper limit of TPS caused by hard disk file I/O is 50,000 TPS, and the theoretical upper limit of TPS caused by CPU processing capacity is approximately 50,000 TPS [Timestamp Capital: Sharding Research Report].
The existing single-chain structure has bottlenecks in single-node resources such as bandwidth, storage, and computing.
In order to improve the throughput of the blockchain system, blockchain
technology and academic experts have proposed a variety of highperformance solutions.[China Academy of Information and Communication Technology:Blockchain White Paper(2018)]:
| Type | DAG | Parallel | Reduction of node number |
|---|---|---|---|
| Optimizing Layer | Topology | Framework | Consensus |
| Security | High | High | May reduce |
| Resource consumption | Low | Low | Low |
| Scalability | Well | Well | Average |
| Difficulty | Relatively Hard | Average | Security Assurance Scheme is relatively hard |
| Performance | High | High | Average |
| Examples | IOTA Byteball Hashgraph |
Ethereum(Sharding) TrustSQL(Subchain) Fabric(Multichannel) |
Algorand BitcoinNG PoS |
Current mainstream Inter-chain technologies include Notary schemes, Sidechains/relays, and Hash-locking.:
| Classification | Notary | Sidechain/relays | Hash-Locking |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inter-Blockchain | Bi-directional | Bi-directional/Uni-directional | Bi-directional |
| Asset Exchange | Support | Support | Support |
| Asset Transfer | Support | Support | No Support |
| Trust | Require the thirdparty | No require | No require |
| Type | Protocol | Technology Architecture | Algorithm |
| Difficulty | Average | Hard | Easy |
| Use Case | Ripple | BTC relay Polkadot COSMOS |
Lightning network |