aelf recently announced the results of their testnet , and they’re highly promising. The project managed to achieve almost 15,000 transactions per second, an incredible achievement which shows the technology is working exactly the way it should.

aelf’s vision is an inspiring one — they want to make blockchain technology much more applicable to real-life projects and business use cases. Their goal is to move the technology out of the realm of speculation and hype and bring it into the physical world.

Blockchain has a ton of possible use cases, and the tidal wave of hype and excitement surrounding the technology in recent times is well justified. But if it’s to really make its mark on the world and achieve its true potential, blockchain has to tackle the scalability problem.

Right now, blockchains are struggling to process enough transactions per second. Bitcoin only manages around 7 , and Ethereum around 20. That’s not enough to support big enterprises with huge volumes of data.

That’s where aelf come in — they want to massively increase blockchain’s transactions per second so large organizations can truly rely on the technology.

Their solution focuses on nodes. Right now, every blockchain network is made up of nodes: computers which hash transactions, create blocks, store the ledger of information, and verify transactions. Essentially, nodes are the network.

In many blockchains too many of these nodes are too slow, which drags the entire network down. Efforts to fix this by increasing block size have led to chains which grow too quickly, and changing consensus mechanisms has resulted in reduced decentralization and democracy.

aelf have a unique solution — they want to build nodes that can support multiple computers, running in parallel. This way, it’s possible for nodes to process many transactions at the same time, and verify multiple transactions all at once.

This massively ramps up transaction speed, boosting scalability. In addition to this, aelf’s system also splits nodes into two clusters which focus on data storage and computational processing respectively.

By allowing multiple actions to take place at the same time in parallel, aelf’s model allows many more transactions per second to take place and increases the volume a blockchain can handle.

This was confirmed in the testnet — 15,000 transactions per second is an incredible achievement, 1000 times more than Ethereum can manage.

Liam Robertson of Alphabit Fund , one of aelf’s investors, is excited about the project. He said, “The market needs such a solution if crypto is ever to become more than a market for speculating on the value of early stage disruptive tech projects. aelf solves for these debilitating constraints with their cross-chain protocol.”

aelf are making progress in a truly important area for blockchain. Once it’s possible to process thousands of transactions per second, blockchain will become a whole lot more scalable. That opens the door to all kinds of future, real-world applications, and an exciting new era of development. The mainnet is due to launch in Q1 2019.