We’ve Solved Blockchain’s Problems, But Nobody Believes Us (Yet) — Benchmarking Results At 8 Million Transactions Per Second
I had an experience with a potential investor recently, which was enlightening. I approached him with a warm introduction from my lawyer, Nimish Patel, whom the investor respects, which gave us some initial credibility. We described our blockchain approach — a new protocol called Devv, that solves all of blockchain’s biggest challenges such as scalability, stability, fraud/theft/loss, and privacy. There are always trade-offs in design decisions, of course, but our trade-offs represent the most scalable blockchain in existence right now. At the end of this article, I show a video and other results of our most recent benchmarking test.
The investor introduced me to some blockchain experts as part of his due diligence process. I’m not using their names out of respect, as I don’t have their permission, and don’t want to imply any formal endorsements — I do realize the irony that I’m not using their names in an article that is pointing out that people don’t believe us yet, but it is another indication of where we are right now — still under most people’s radar.
The first person I was introduced to was one of the technical leads for one of the biggest blockchain projects in the space. It was a real pleasure to talk with someone who truly understands consensus algorithms, and we talked for an hour about our sharding solution. In addition to being sharp as a tack, he was very friendly — a nice person all around. In the end, he said that “the way you’re scaling is one of the only ways to truly scale blockchain”, and he also said it was “rare to see a deal like this with unicorn potential,” which I found flattering given his previous success in the blockchain space. The second person I did due diligence with was a founder of another multi-billion dollar distributed ledger effort, and the third person I did due diligence was introduced to me as the head of blockchain development at a Fortune 100 company, who oversees 300 blockchain developers. It was a thorough due diligence process, and all three reported back that what we are doing is legitimate.
The enlightening part of the interaction is what came next. The investor admitted to me that “I didn’t really believe what you are doing was real until my guys came back and told me it was, and that I should have a hard look at it. I originally thought it was too good to be true.”
Initially, I just felt flattered by our conversation and by the fact that he sent me a term sheet. It later struck me, though, that he was saying (when you think about it) that he initially thought we were lying, or at least exaggerating. The nature of the comment struck me, and as I thought about it more, I realized that many of my past interactions could be explained the same way. I’ve told many people about our solution. I’ve done 9 months of iterations on our whitepaper to try and make it clear and concise. I’ve had dozens, maybe hundreds, of conversations with different people in the blockchain space, who seemed to have similar sentiments. My partner in growing Devvio, Ray Quintana, is a Tier-1, well-respected VC, who has had similar experiences as me in discussing Devvio. He’s told me many times “They don’t get it yet, but that’s normal when you have a technology that can change the world,” after many of his conversations with investors and potential partners. One of his interactions was with a blockchain marketer we were thinking of hiring, who read the beginning of our white paper, and simply said, “you do a good job describing the problems in blockchain, but you have to focus on the problems you solve”. Ummm… right. We wouldn’t list problems in our whitepaper if we didn’t solve them. If she had read the whole thing, she would have seen that we described solutions to those problems, but she didn’t conceive that we could solve all of those problems in a single solution (and therefore quit reading), because no one else in the space is doing that. Keep in mind, this is an example of someone who was looking to work for us!
I’m an experienced entrepreneur, so although I wouldn’t quite say people’s reactions are surprising to me (after all, there is a lot of unfounded hype in the blockchain space right now), I’ll admit I think people have been too easily dismissive of our company, given the people behind the effort. Our team consists of experienced business people, and we aren’t the type of group to make unfounded claims. Devvio has a working system, and all of the areas that I originally considered software research, and therefore higher risk, are now working in our alpha systems. The work now is simply a matter of software engineering — it’s just a matter of taking a working system and productizing it. We’ve done that before. Many of the people we’ve spoken to are missing out on a pretty spectacular deal.
I think that similar to the investor who did all of the due diligence, most people simply don’t believe that what we’re doing is real. However, that is a problem that will go away in time. As more technical experts look at our whitepaper, as we release our testnet, and if nothing else, as our version 1 release goes live — people will see what we’re doing is real, and not hype.
In my view, there are four primary things a blockchain protocol needs for mainstream, enterprise, and institutional acceptance. All of these things must exist in a single solution.
1. It needs to be scalable. If you build a house on a faulty foundation, you only have yourself to blame. Anyone using blockchain needs a system that can scale with the massive, upcoming growth in the blockchain industry. As you’ll see below, we can scale well into the millions of transactions per second, on-chain.
2. It needs to be stable. If the price of a cryptocurrency is going up, no one wants to spend it. If the price is going down, no one wants to accept it. We have a one-to-one fiat backed stable coin concept that will allow price stability.
3. It needs to have a government accepted privacy solution that works within a Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money-Laudering (AML) context. Blockchain won’t reach mass use without a good privacy solution. On the other hand, governments are going to want transparency for illegal financial transactions such as money laundering and terrorism. Governments will block cryptocurrency’s use at the exchange level, for example, for privacy solutions like zero-knowledge proofs, which provide true privacy. Our privacy solution is the only solution that solves both of those needs — One might say that our solution is “True privacy, other than court-ordered transparency”.
4. It needs to have a solution for fraud, theft, and loss. Billions of dollars of cryptocurrency have been stolen. I’m personally shocked that this hasn’t been more of an issue across the board for blockchain efforts. Institutional, enterprise, and mass consumer use just won’t happen if you can simply lose your private key, and everything is gone. There needs to be workable protections. But how can you do that with an immutable blockchain? Our solution, which we call Devvnero, is clever but not terribly complicated when you think it through. It is a good solution to one of the biggest problems in the space.
Blockchain as an industry will explode, in my opinion, when a solution has all four of those ingredients. We are the first blockchain to solve all of those problems in a single solution. Our scalability solution is documented below, our stability solution is a flavor of an approach that is known to work, and our privacy and fraud/theft/loss solutions are clever, but straightforward and easy to understand — they are not technologically complex and there is no risk that they will work or not. There is no strong reason to doubt what we’re doing is a good solution to all of blockchain’s biggest challenges, if one does their due diligence.
As far as scalability, we recently finished another benchmark test at over 8 million transactions per second, on-chain! The Bitcoin network can process 5 transactions per second and Visa can process on the order of 24,000 transactions per second.
We videoed the benchmarking run as it was processed. Our algorithm works by scaling through many shards which we call Tier 2 (T2) networks. The T2 blocks become inputs into a single Tier 1 (T1) network. T2 shards then handle settlement (i.e. receiving transactions) based on the T1 blocks. In order to benchmark throughput on a system like this, you have to calculate two things.
1. The number of transactions that the T2 shards can process per second.
2. Using that T2 shard information, the number of transactions per second that the T1 network can process using the T2 blocks as inputs.
T2 shards are independent blockchains, so in our benchmarking test, we pre-processed the T2 blocks. From the T1 network’s point of view, there is no difference between a pre-processed block or a block that was just created — it is just information coming in as an input. Because T2 networks are independent, it is a valid approach to precompute their transactions when testing T1 throughput. We pre-processed T2 transactions for 80 hours to get over 29 million transactions to be processed. We also felt that in order for a benchmarking result to be valid, we should have 2 T2 networks running live, so that the speed calculations were being run at a time when we could verify that transactions were being both sent and received correctly between wallets while calculating the results. The full test, therefore, has 1 T1 network, 2 T2 networks, and a process that sends block inputs to the T1 as if 98 other T2 networks were running. Another assumption in this simulation is that the T1 is processing the blocks from these specific T2 networks, but there are more T2 networks in the overall system whose blocks would be processed as part of future T1 blocks.
We hashed our code in Bitbucket, so we have a provable reference on our benchmarking results. People will be able to see that code when our testnet goes live shortly. In the meantime, we felt it would be valuable to present a video of our results along with some analysis.
Here is a shortened video that shows the most recent benchmarking run.
In the benchmark, we start the processes that run the T1 network and the T2 networks, as well as the process that takes all of the pre-computed T2 blocks and sends them out through ZMQ networking communications. It takes around 5 minutes to prepare the pre-computed transaction blocks to be sent through the network, so this shorter video doesn’t show that processing, in order to show the results more succinctly.
Here is a longer version of the video with the full run itself, uncut.
Nick Williams, our Director of Blockchain Development, and I discuss some other aspects of the Devv blockchain while we are waiting for the pre-computed blocks to be ready for the T1 consensus processing.
The final results show a benchmarking result of 8.1 million transactions per second. This benchmarking refers to on-chain transactions for a protocol implementing a public blockchain. The Devv blockchain is the fastest blockchain in the world. Below are some additional details on those results. The total transactions (29 million) are a bit larger than the ballpark number we referenced in the video (>20 million). Also, one can note that the T1 blocks are much more succinct than the T2 blocks per transaction, as the T2 blocks contain all of the original signatures, and the T1 blocks only contain signatures for the consolidated data from the T2 networks.
Whether someone sees the video and believes we have a blockchain solution that can process millions of transactions per second, or they need to see the testnet, or they need to see the working version 1 release of the Devv blockchain, it is just a matter of time until people believe what we are doing is real and a significant technology in the blockchain space.
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