Helium recently announced that the next generation of our network will be built on a blockchain. It’s a new blockchain we’ve designed from the ground up to cater to physical assets in the real world while also turning the idea of wasteful proof of work on its head. For more details on the Helium blockchain, start with this blog post from Andrew Thompson then go really deep with the Helium Whitepaper.

When talking through our plans with existing customers, prospects, and other interested parties, there is inevitably a point in the conversation where the line of questioning goes something like this:

“Is your blockchain scalable? Won’t my sensor data take forever to arrive while you mine blocks? The bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains have trouble scaling transactions. How will yours be any better?”

These are good questions. Even casual observers of bitcoin and Ethereum, arguably the two most visible blockchains, have seen stats and headlines about their transaction rates. At the time of writing it was roughly 3.3 and 9.2 per second, respectively. So how will the Helium blockchain do any better? How will it scale when millions of devices try to send sensor data across the network in parallel?

Machine Application Data and Blockchain Transactions Are Different

To answer these questions, it is important to note that within the Helium network there are two subsystems working in parallel:

The subsystem that routes what we can call machine application data;

The Helium blockchain itself.

We’ll examine both of these and their scalability characteristics in a moment, but the main takeaway is that the data sent from sensors gets routed in near-real time to your cloud-based applications while the Helium blockchain is processing the related transactions asynchronously.