American cloud service provider Akamai Technologies has filed a new patent for a high-performance blockchain capable of processing a large number of transactions within a short span of time.

The patent, filed on December 26, 2017, was finally published by the US Patent and Trademark Office on April 2, 2019. The proposed system seeks to improve the throughput of a distributed ledger system by processing transactions concurrently rather than the existing sequential order of processing.

High-Performance

In the patent application, Akamai Technologies has proposed a set of computing elements to receive the setup of a network of nodes which will concurrently process and add newer blocks to the blockchain. Currently, blockchain implementations process the blocks in a sequential manner, or one at a time.

This severely limits the performance of blockchain implementations as all nodes have to verify singular blocks before they can begin verifying the next one. This creates bottlenecks in processing, communicating, and storing the block in its aggregate form.

The proposed setup involves a distributed ledger which can process a large number of transactions in a scalable and reliable manner. It allows nodes to organize and process data concurrently with very little synchronization between them.

All network nodes are considered equal on the network, operate autonomously, and do not control one another. The network can be accessed by edge networks, which are referred to as edge servers. The edge network supports a globally distributed system that provides a message processing service.

Every message is associated with a transaction. Users can interact with edge network servers who then internally process the transaction.

Faster Method

The proposed method is comprised of local computing nodes in the edge network. These local computing nodes are spread across the globe and act as a gateway to access the network. They work to validate transactions and add them to the mempool.

The transaction is then propagated to other computing nodes in the network for verification. The transaction data is segmented and processed to enable faster verification. They are aggregated together after verification and added to the blockchain.

The cloud delivery platform is also developing a blockchain based network with MUFG for enabling faster payment settlements. The technology proposed in the patent could be used for a future blockchain based payment system. Distributed ledgers have several use cases, which has prompted technology companies to study the industry and build better solutions.

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