Blockchain technology is the most disruptive technology of the 21st Century. The advantages it poses are unheard off and the technology is cutting edge, but in order to implement it, current procedures and technologies would have to be scrapped completely and reconfigured to the blockchain. Blockchain technology is the future, this we all know. But is it actually ready to take on global traffic volumes?

The answer to that question is simply no. The only standing and working example of implemented blockchain technology is the cryptocurrency market. And so far it has been adequate. But within ten years of the cryptocurrency market, the network is already a victim of fraying because of unprecedented load and traffic volume. Ethereum, formerly the world’s second largest cryptocurrency, fell and is continuing to book losses because of its network fraying issues.  

Another quite serious issue that the cryptocurrency market and the blockchain industry is faced with is the lack of scalability on all the networks right now. Because of the lack of scalability on these networks, the transactions per second or the TPS rates of the entire network goes down. And that is a major concern for everyone who believes that the blockchain is the way forward because without scalability and a high TPS rate the blockchain is in no position to take over the global financial market and its requirements.

The problem with increasing scalability on current networks is that the increase of scalability has always led to a drastic decrease in decentralisation and a even bigger decrement in security features. Because neither of these deductions are unacceptable to the cryptocurrency market, the community, for the past couple of years, has suffered the lack of scalability on their networks.  

With that being said, however, there are many blockchain companies and startups that are targetting just that; the blockchain’s scalability issues. The main problem here is that the conventional method to increase scalability involves cutting corners in security and decentralisation. But there are companies who believe they have found another way to solve this problem. Given that the blockchain’s scalability issues are something that needs to be sorted as soon as possible, there are many companies whose mission statements are just that.

Here are the top 3 Highly Scalable Blockchain projects in the market right now.

Top 3 Highly Scalable Blockchain Projects

1) QuarkChain: A High-Capacity Peer-to-Peer Transactional System

QuarkChain is a blockchain industry startup that is essentially working on creating a transactional system that is supported by a high capacity blockchain. By providing transactional systems and ecosystems with high-performance blockchains, QuarkChain is ensuring high TPS rates without having to cut corners in security and decentralisation. QuarkChain uses cutting-edge technology to compensate for the blockchain’s lack of scalability and ease of fraying.

The main features of the QuarkChain Blockchain are the following:

• Scalability
• Anti-Centralised Techniques
• Authenticity and Security

The team at QuarkChain uses sharding technology to ensure their high throughput blockchain’s transactions per second rate.

The Technology:They achieve this by having a multi-layered blockchain. The first layer of the QuarkChain is an elastic blockchain or shards of blockchains which are placed on top of a core blockchain which is called the root blockchain.

To ensure that their race for scalability does not make them cut corners in the security and decentralisation of the blockchain, the two other main features that the QuarkChain boasts of are its; security and anti-centralised scalability.

For Security:The company has implemented a game theory framework that incentivises the security. 50% of the entire network’s hash power is allocated to the root chain which prevents double spending and keeps a track of all transactions on the network.

Anti-Centralisation:In terms of making sure that the network is as decentralised as possible, the company in its blockchain network has implemented an anti-centralised horizontal scalability technique. The anti-centralised horizontal scalability technique is essentially the network allowing cheap nodes to form a cluster node of their own to avoid the forming of a supernode. Avoiding the formation of a supernode is imperative in decentralised networks because it forms a centralised node of control.

Transactions per Second: QuarkChain is currently doing 10,000 transactions per second on Testnet. Which is remarkably high considering the current average TPS rate of networks right now. One of the main goals of QuarkChain as a scalability startup is to reach 1 million TPS before its competitors.  

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2) Zilliqa: A Secure, Scalable Blockchain Platform

Zilliqa is by far the most famous scalability project and startup because it is one of the first ones in the market and industry. Zilliqa is a secure and scalable blockchain platform that sports a high-throughput blockchain. Zilliqa also happens to be the first blockchain scalability project that introduced the sharding technique for scalability issues. And happens to have one of the top TPS rates in the market right now.

The main objectives of Zilliqa are:

• Increase Scalability
• Performance
• Security

The Technology: Zilliqa ensures the rate of scalability that the blockchain needs to reach by using the network sharding techniques. It essentially splits the blockchain into different subgroups, each one of these subgroups is called shards. These shards have a dedicated task to perform. Because of this method of splitting the blockchain into multiple groups, the blockchain can process transactions faster because the shards can parallelly process transactions in an isolated way until a consensus is required.

Security: The sharding technique takes a toll on the security of the network. In order to make sure that no corners are cut, Zilliqa uses Proof of Work algorithms. Contrary to common belief, Zilliqa uses PoW to ensure security in the network and to facilitate the sharding technique of the network.

Performance: Zilliqa essentially combines the payment requirements and the blockchain’s requirements and makes the Zilliqa Blockchain platform. It ensures high rates of transactions on the blockchain while making sure that the transactions are as secure as possible. Hence hitting the sweet spot for both industries.

Transactions per Second: The Zilliqa payment protocol and blockchain platform right now averages 2,828 TPS on testnet while existing blockchains are performing 7-15 TPS.

3) EOS

EOS is a blockchain protocol company that is powered by the native cryptocurrency EOS. It is also the most powerful infrastructure for decentralised application. The blockchain protocol mirrors the same procedures and features of a full-fledged computer and hence is, as a protocol, very powerful.

The main objectives of EOS are:

• Scalability
• Becoming the Dapp Platform
• Security

The three spearheads of the EOS platform is that they are highly scalable, reliable and flexible. The idea behind the EOS platform and blockchain is to become big enough to support full industry requirement on the blockchain. The main aim of EOS is to create and facilitate a completely decentralised web.

The Technology: Two of the biggest selling point of the EOS platform is that the company claims to have the capability to process and perform millions of transactions per second and also have expressed that they will have no transaction fees. EOS is also a company that is trying to promote both horizontal and vertical scaling in terms of networks.

Performance: The three main parts that EOS is focussing on at this point is to make the use of blockchain free of charge. They are planning to achieve this by completely slashing transaction fees on their network. The second most important part of the EOS network is to have millions of users on their network. A way to increase the number of users is to first make it free of cost and then subsequently make it fast enough for all the users.

Ethereum Killer: The EOS.IO is also called the Ethereum Killer because it is poised to take over for Ethereum as the platform for Dapp development. The EOS platform has solutions to all of Ethereum’s problems especially its scalability. EOS has already taken over ethereum in Dapps Transaction volume recently. 

Transactions per Second: With that in mind, the blockchain platform is planning to do this by increasing the TPS of the blockchain. EOS is increasing the TPS of its blockchain by allowing both parallel and sequential processing power and capabilities. This way the blockchain does not have to choose between the two and at the same time can process quite a large number of transactions at the same time, in turn increasing the networks TPS rate. The current TPS rate of the EOS platform is 3,000 TPS.

Conclusion

All these projects are trying to get VISA level tps/Network capacity, But it’s early to say to that who will be the leader in the space in the next five years. The current network size, dapp usage is really low as compare to VISA/Mastercard. One thing is sure that, These projects need to develop new technical updates regularly to achieve the maximum tps goal. There are also few more new projects who are claiming to do High-speed transactions on testnet, But in Reality, Testnet result doesn’t count. Let’s see how the year of 2019 will unfold for these projects in term of scalability and network usage.

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Hitesh Malviya

Hitesh Malviya is the Founder of ItsBlockchain. He is one of the most early adopters of blockchain & cryptocurrency enthusiast in India. After being into space for a few years, he started IBC in 2016 to help other early adopters learn about the technology.
Before IBC, Hitesh has founded 4 companies in the cyber security & IT space.