A problem tied to how bitcoin and other cryptocurrency transactions are processed and completed has long dogged enthusiasts of the digital-asset community, but a group of scholars believe that they may have a solution.

A team of Northwestern University students and faculty members, in conjunction with bloXroute Labs, are attempting to improve the so-called scalability issue, without removing its decentralized nature, an integral component of bitcoin.

“When you look at two networks like bitcoin and a central bank, one is centralized and one is not,” said Sarit Markovich, clinical associate professor of strategy at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “If we want it [bitcoin] to scale we have to compromise, which means we need to get to some level of centralization.”

Scalability refers to the ability to process bitcoin and other cryptocurrency transactions efficiently and quickly, and has been viewed as a crucial feature for the digital asset to achieve more widespread acceptance, market participants have said.

Increasing bitcoin’s processing capacity has been a testy topic in the cryptoworld and has mostly amounted to a battle between those who are so-called miners of bitcoin, who verify bitcoin transactions, and those who develop software to run atop the so-called blockchain, or distributed ledger that underpins the virtual asset.

Critics have argued that increasing the number of units, or megabytes, that can be processed in a transaction will drive up costs for miners and in turn drive out miners, disrupting the natural, decentralized community of verifiers of bitcoin transactions that support the currency.

The Northwestern University proposal attempts to address some of those issues by creating infrastructure that compresses the information on the blockchain before sending, with the propagation being it will go faster.

Moreover, the network is more centralized when using bloXroute because it doesn’t require a consensus or protocol change beyond system parameters, according to the company’s white paper.

On a public blockchain like bitcoin BTCUSD, +0.20% , when a new block is mined, the miner sends it to a number of peers, who then relay it to peers, and so on until it reaches nearly the entire network. This cumbersome process is what bloXroute Labs calls “scalability bottleneck.” BloXroute and the team from Northwestern plan to “safely increase the block size and to cut down the time interval between blocks,” according to the companies white paper.

The infrastructure project solution that bloXroute Labs is developing works below the blockchain application layer and improves node-synchronization, which it says will improve cryptocurrency scalability and reduce this scalability bottleneck. Node-synchronization is the by which new nodes joining the network send requests to other nodes to obtain ledger. A “node” is another way to refer to those users that validate bitcoin transactions on the blockchain.

“We know theoretically there is a way to improve scalability, by creating some level of centralization, but it would still look like a decentralized network. We are definitely getting good results,” said Markovich.

At the center of the effort by the Northwestern team is that some 10 years after bitcoin was first unveiled, the most famous blockchain and cryptocurrency, still isn’t properly equipped to serve as a form of payment akin to companies like Visa V, +0.45% and Mastercard MA, +0.25% , which process more than 5,000 transactions per second. Bitcoin currently processes anywhere between three and five transactions per second.

As much as the hard-core blockchain fanatics prefer the status quo of anonymity and mass-governance—the idea where everyone on the network has a say in proposed rule changes—their decentralized currency doesn’t have a use case if it can’t scale, says bloXroute.

Still, the Northwestern University scaling project begun in March 2018 is in its infancy, but according to Markovich, early tests show they are making inroads into the scaling issue.

“We are scaling at 100 times better than what bitcoin is doing now,” said Markovich. “And we are hoping for 1,000.”

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