1. What exactly is the problem?

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain are increasing in popularity and gaining public awareness, but there’s a risk the technology will be unable to keep up with demand.

The biggest names in the business, Bitcoin and Ethereum, use blocks to process transactions. However, in the early days of their development, the maximum size of these blocks was limited — in Bitcoin’s case, to just 1MB.

Although this mechanism was designed to make Bitcoin more secure, it hasn’t helped the network become future-proof. With each transaction comes data, and with a maximum size of 1MB per block, there’s only so many payments that can be processed at once.

At a maximum, Bitcoin can handle about three to four transactions per second. But if crypto was to go mainstream, it would need to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second to ensure the economy could keep moving without massive delays for consumers and businesses.

Sadly, Ethereum has a similar problem — as its co-founder Vitalik Buterin himself admitted. The network has a maximum capacity of 15 transactions per second, and he warned that if the status quo remains, the industry’s infrastructure will be unable to cope.