Scalability, Safety, And Performance In Blockchains. Problems And Possible Solutions. FLETA Case.

The world of the blockchain is gaining more traction in the everyday world, with more cases of use and applications that are generated every day in an increasingly globalized and competitive economy that demands tangible, reliable and safe goods and services.

That is why blockchain technology has gained space for some time ago to achieve linking real use cases with a world increasingly technologically decentralized. But these changes also generate challenges, and one of the most important to which the chain of blocks is exposed today for its adoption on a large scale is without a doubt its scalability.

As is known, the vast majority of blockchains have speed problems to process transactions, something known as scalability. Therefore, if any platform wishes to successfully break into the space other than cryptography, it must be able to combine three key factors such as scalability, security, and consensus.

For us to have a closer appreciation, VISA achieves a maximum of 24 thousand TPS in its transactions, hence its success to be used as a bridge of payments worldwide.

Therefore, if we want intelligent contracts, decentralized applications (DApps) and daily payments can be made with blockchain technology and through cryptocurrencies, it is necessary to have an available platform that guarantees high transaction speeds together with the security and immutability of the network to generate a reliable and very useful mechanism.

Technological resources are increasing, and although we are at an early stage of adoption, there is no doubt that the more research, development, and innovation generated within the blockchain technology, the greater will be its overall success.

Scalability

The battle for a scalable solution is the modular part of many blockchains. Bitcoin barely processes 4.6 transactions per second, which, compared to Visa's 24 TPS, gives us an idea of the adoption potential that blockchain technology must achieve.

According to Delotte Insights,

“blockchain-based systems are comparatively slow … and is a major concern for companies that depend on high-performance legacy transaction processing systems.”

The world realized the problems of scalability in 2017 and 2018: transfer delays and high rates in the Bitcoin network, in addition to the notorious problem of congestion of the Ethereum network by the Cryptokitties application.

This has undoubtedly generated a large-scale debate and a lunar race to improve the problem of scalability in public blockchains. There are projects that have improved this performance such as EOS, Steem, Matic, ICON, but none of them has managed to go beyond the VISA barrier.

However, recently, this May 16, in Seoul, South Korea; FLETA, a blockchain platform that aims to create a sustainable DApp ecosystem; has launched a public testnet in its beta phase with open source that promises to solve the typical problems currently of the blockchains.

Through its official website and through a press release, they have informed that their repository in Github is available to be used by all those interested in testing the benefits of its platform that promises to generate a disruption in the decentralized world of applications thanks to its scalable architecture, efficient operations and proven Second Transaction capabilities that have a proven maximum of 15,000 TPS so far, CLOSING its limit to the current VISA capacity.

However, the problem of scalability is not an isolated factor to be solved, since attempts to achieve faster transactions also generate a second drawback and is the ability to fragment transactions to make them lighter and not cause problems or honeypot that are exploited by cyberdelicuentes. Then we enter into a network security issue.

This is where two important factors to highlight the blockchain technology come into play: “Validation and Sharding”.

Validation And Sharding.

The first term refers to the type of structure used to confirm transactions that take place in the blockchain. In general, Bitcoin and blockchain majorities use a structure of the Merkel Tree type, which is a fundamental part of the blockchain technology of the first generation and to a large extent, of the second generation.

A Merkle tree is a structure that allows an ‘efficient' and secure verification of the content in a large amount of data. It summarizes all transactions in a block by producing a fingerprint of the entire set of transactions, which allows the user to verify whether or not a transaction is included in a block.

In order to carry out a clear and correct verification, the presence of the entire Merkel tree is a prerequisite and leads to a large number of calculations, making the blockchain slower, that is, less scalable. Even when Merkle Tree guarantees verification at a practical level, it requires a lot of memory and calculation for an SPV, Simple Payment Verification.

However, if instead of using a Merkle Tree, a LEVEL Tree method is used, the possibilities of reducing the memory resources for the calculations for an SPV are exponential and the network communication in mobile devices in which the tree is. Level Tree is a structure in which the maximum number of inscribable transactions per block is 65535.

This method was applied by FLETA in its tests and as a result, it generated a faster and more fluid validation of transactions, as shown by its test report.

FLETA indicates that it is a much more efficient system, making a tree where the process hash is simplified, and each level has 16 subunits.

On the other hand, by having an efficient validation system, it will be necessary to achieve a parallel processing of high-speed transactions to avoid network congestion. Logically, this high-speed processing is only possible if it is possible to divide the transactions into fragments to process it, in addition to the data to store it. This principle, known as sharding, is what has allowed many blockchains to distribute the load and make the database more efficient, in order to achieve the desired scalability.

This technological solution in the blockchain is relatively new and only some projects like Shard Coin, Telegram Open Network and FLETA have been innovating and applying in this sense to give solutions to the problem of scalability.

But the previous solutions only solve a couple of drawbacks of the blockchain, to the detriment in many cases of the important safety factor.

Consensun Mechanism.

Although the algorithm used by Bitcoin, Proof of Work, is one of the most robust, it is no less true that it is perhaps for many the most obsolete because of its high resource requirement to carry it out and its high latency.

In contrast, EOS, Tron and another similar blockchain on which the promises of the largest use cases are supported by decentralized applications, have an improved algorithm based on DpoS algorithms where they improve the transaction speed, but the method of Adjustment of the block generation time based on the difficulty, prevents further progress at the speed of the blockchain.

Therefore, scalability solutions are limited by the security factor that predominates over this criterion. This is how FLETA has proposed a new consensus mechanism where the possibilities of fork are null and the vulnerability of the network is practically nil.

With this algorithm, Proof of Formulation (PoF), the company claims to have managed to balance the loads between scalability and security, improving the latency of the network.

Finally, many blockchains are offering today also good transaction speeds, including new protocols where they can strengthen security, but they require a migratory process to other chains often traumatic, where even the transfer of tokens can happen in compromising the network In herself.

Independent Chains.

The idea of being a kind of bridge or gateway to communicate two different blockchains has allowed solving this problem to a great extent, including projects such as ICON have already made much progress in this regard. FLETA also rests its technological benefits on this concept, so that developers can make transfers of tokens without major traumas.

FLETA presents a gateway, its FLETA Gateway that allows interoperability with other existing platforms such as Ethereum, EOS, and Tron.

For now, the blockchain adoption on a large scale promises to be a reality in the short term, as it has been noticed by large influencers of crypto space. The launch of FLETA with its high TPS promises to create a milestone within the industry that allows the massification of applications that generate utility in many areas of daily life, where we will use technology without realizing that we are using it.