Researchers have re-engineered a blockchain used around the world that can now support up to seven times more transactions per second.
A blockchain is a system in which a record of transaction data is maintained across several computers that are linked in a network. A “block” stores information about transactions: their date, time, amount, and who participates in them. As the name suggests, a blockchain consists of multiple blocks together.
With the work of a team of researchers at the University of Waterloo, the volume of data that can be processed by the blockchain Hyperledger Fabric has increased, moving from 3,000 to 20,000 transactions per second.
Among its many applications, Hyperledger Fabric is known for IBM’s Food Trust, which uses the blockchain to make food supply chains safer and more sustainable.
“Hyperledger Fabric has many applications. Our goal was to accelerate them all by accelerating the engine underneath it,” said Christian Gorenflo, a PhD Candidate in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.
To make Hyperledger Fabric more practical in high-paced industries, improvements needed to be made to the speed at which transactions could be processed. To speed up this process, researchers implemented several architectural optimizations. These include redesigning the blockchain’s ordering service, transaction service, and data management layer – three steps to increase transaction speed.
“Increasing transactions throughput to 20,000 per second is a good start, but we would like to take Hyperledger Fabric even further,” said Srinivasan Keshav, a professor in the school of Computer Science.
In the meanwhile, reception to this development has been very positive.
A paper detailing the work, titled “FastFabric: Scaling Hyperledger Fabric to 20,000 Transactions per Second”, was authored by Waterloo’s Faculty of Mathematics researchers Gorenflo and Keshav, Faculty of Engineering’s Lukasz Golab, and PhD candidate Stephen Lee from the University of Massachusetts.