Australia‘s national science agency CSIRO has teamed up with the University of Sydney to perform a global test on the blockchain network that the two parties have jointly developed. The test, performed on Amazon Web Services (AWS) global cloud computing network, has revealed that the new blockchain platform is capable of processing 30,000 cross-border transactions per second.

CSIRO has released the test results in an official announcement and revealed that it was working in tandem with the Concurrent Systems Research Group at the university. The project is dubbed Red Belly Blockchain (RBB) and the experiment saw RBB platform installed on 1000 machines across 14 of the 18 geographic regions, serviced by AWS, including North America, South America, Europe and Australia.

The benchmark was set by sending 30,000 transactions from different geographic regions, showing an average transaction latency of 3 seconds. In comparison, popular blockchain platforms require minutes, while other technologies are typically able to process less than 20 transactions per second.

The report claims that, “Red Belly Blockchain is solving the issues that have plagued previous generations of blockchain systems including environmental impact from significant energy use, double spending where an individual spends their money twice by initiating more than one transaction, and throughput, which refers to how many units of information can be processed in a short amount of time.“

According to Dr. Vincent Gramoli, senior researcher at both CSIRO and University of Sydney, “Real-world applications of blockchain have been struggling to get off the ground due to issues with energy consumption and complexities induced by the proof of work. The deployment of Red Belly Blockchain on AWS shows the unique scalability and strength of the next generation ledger technology in a global context.“

RBB is different to major blockchains like bitcoin or ethereum because it does not rely on proof-of-work protocol that slows down creation of blocks and consumes huge amounts of energy. Instead, RBB utilizes a unique algorithm that is able to scale without skyrocketing the energy consumption.

The project is currently trying to raise money to help commercialize the technology and develop additional features. Kosmos Capital, a venture capital firm specializing in blockchain assets, is one of the leading investors.

Its general partner Anton Uvarov said that, “We’re aware of several competing projects from heavyweights in the US, namely MIT and Cornell. […] However, having invested time and research analysing Red Belly, it appears to be the first one to address lack of accountability in blockchain technology, unlike current blockchains like Ethereum and EOS.“

He added that, “The first time we came across the Red Belly blockchain project, we were stunned by its technological advancement, protocol specifications and particularly, how well it was able to remain under the radar of so many investors.“

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