Author: For more than a decade, there has been one major issue thwarting the adoption of cryptocurrency: transactions simply take too long. Fortunately, researchers at MIT have now announced that they have developed a more efficient system for routing cryptocurrency transactions, which they have dubbed “Spider.”
According to ComputerWorld, MIT researchers are able to use this “Spider” routing scheme to make crypto transactions up to four-times faster than ever before (!).
Four-Times Faster Crypto Transactions
Through extensive testing and simulation, MIT researchers have announced that Spider routing has proven capable of processing 95% of a network’s cryptocurrency transactions, while only using about 25% of the funds needed for traditional routing schemes. This represents a significant improvement in the speed and efficiency of cryptocurrency transactions.
Even though cryptocurrency has become more popular than ever before, the ability to make instant payments remains one of the biggest challenges faced by the industry. In fact, according to some blockchain experts, slow transaction speeds are one of the major factors preventing the widespread adoption of cryptocurrency.
With that being said, MIT’s new Spider-routing scheme might just be the secret tool needed to kick off a global adoption of crypto, possibly even outpacing and outliving traditional forms of fiat currency. In fact, if Spider is as successful as we all hope, it’s expected that digital currencies might soon make traditional banking completely obsolete.
One of the major benefits of using digital currencies is that a person’s bank accounts and personal credit would remain in their control, rather than in the supervision of a bank or another financial institution.
Off-Chain Transactions To The Rescue
As it stands, crypto networks only allow a small amount of data to be processed per block.
For example, on the Bitcoin network, there is an average of 3.3 to 7 transactions per second (TPS). While this might seem like decent transaction speeds, when you compare it to Visa’s payment network, which processes roughly 1,700 transactions per second (TPS) and is capable of even higher speeds, you can easily see where blockchain’s deficiency lies.
Compare to current crypto transactions, MIT’s Spider-routing scheme performs its transactions off of the blockchain. This is known as “Layer 2” topology, which bypasses the blockchain’s inefficiencies, but still makes use of its open-source, public ledger.
According to Avivah Litan, VP of research at Gartner, “MIT researchers are cleverly applying existing techniques commonly used to improve network performance to blockchain channel solutions that have been developed to offload main-net transaction volume and subsequent performance bottlenecks.”
With that being said, we’ll have to wait and see what further news will be announced when MIT researchers release more details later this month.
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