MEDIA RELEASE

25 SEPTEMBER 2018

The first international trial of next-generation Red Belly Blockchain has shown increased speed and energy efficiencies at a global scale.

Red Belly Blockchain, developed by the technology arm of Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO’s Data61, and the Concurrent Systems Research Group at the University of Sydney, today announced the outcomes of its first large-scale experiment, undertaken on Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) global cloud infrastructure.

Red Belly Blockchain is solving the issues that have plagued previous generations of blockchain systems including environmental impact from significant energy use, double spending where an individual spends their money twice by initiating more than one transaction, and throughput, which refers to how many units of information can be processed in a short amount of time.

The experiment deployed Red Belly Blockchain on 1,000 virtual machines across 14 of AWS’ 18 geographic regions, including North America, South America, Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Europe. A benchmark was set by sending 30,000 transactions per second from different geographic regions, demonstrating an average transaction latency (or delay) of three seconds with 1,000 replicas (a machine that maintains a copy of the current state of the Blockchain and the balance of all accounts.)

This is comparable to the latency obtained during a test in 2017 with only 260 replicas located in a single region. In comparison, mainstream blockchain technologies need minutes, with other technologies typically processing less than 20 transactions per second.  

The experiment highlights Red Belly Blockchain’s scalability while retaining fast transaction speeds and high security, making it ideal for faster processing of financial transactions and microgrids that use peer-to-peer trading to transform the energy sector.

“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 and head of Concurrent Systems Research Group at the University of Sydney said.

“The deployment of Red Belly Blockchain on AWS shows the unique scalability and strength of the next generation ledger technology in a global context.”

Mainstream blockchain technologies like Bitcoin require proof of work – a protocol to satisfy certain requirements and verify a transaction – and need to solve crypto puzzles, a highly computational task that slows down the creation of blocks and requires massive amounts of energy. Red Belly Blockchain differs from these blockchains as it is underpinned by a unique algorithm and offers performance that scales without an equivalent increase in electricity consumption.  

Two earlier experiments were conducted on AWS from July 2017 to May 2018. While one of the earlier tests showed a throughput of 660,000 transactions per second across 300 machines in a single Availability Zone, this latest deployment on AWS’ network spun up a global network designed to test Red Belly Blockchain’s performance on a large scale.

“AWS Cloud provides innovative organizations of all kinds with a global network of computing power, allowing organizations like Red Belly Blockchain to quickly conduct large-scale experiments that break new ground,” Simon Elisha, Head of Solutions Architecture, Amazon Web Services Public Sector, Australia and New Zealand, said.

“This is the latest example of how builders and creators all over Australia are leveraging AWS to quickly and cost-effectively move a project from concept phase right through to realizing commercial potential, locally and on a global scale.”

Red Belly Blockchain is a graduate from ON Prime, CSIRO’s Pre-accelerator program, which aided in providing early business model development for the startup.

For more information on Red Belly Blockchain, visit: http://redbellyblockchain.io/

Image courtesy of Mariano Mantel via Flickr