Waves platform, the custom blockchain token initiative targeting mass-market consumer and business adoption, has announced a series of measures to enable greater network scalability.
Scalability has long been a problem for cryptocurrency platforms. Since every transaction is recorded on the blockchain, the requirement of resources to process and store the information continues to increase. Bitcoin itself has been the subject of numerous scalability proposals, including Segregated Witness (SegWit) to improve its current maximum capacity and allow greater adoption.
Diverse Approaches for Scalability
The Waves team has made a series of publications and presentations aimed at addressing various aspects of scalability. These will be integrated into the Waves protocol in near future.
Early in January, Leonid Reyzin delivered a presentation titled 'Improving Authenticated Dynamic Dictionaries' at Real World Crypto 2017. It offered details about possible ways to streamline the large and growing key value store associated with blockchain transactions. The implementation of authenticated data structures allows for continued use of lower-powered devices to maintain the network, enabling greater efficiency than current approaches.
Waves platform is refactoring and optimizing the storage to reduce
blockchain size so that it is ready for different implementations in the near future.
Next-gen PoS and Choices for Miners
This can dramatically increase transaction throughput. Using these combined techniques, the Waves development team aims not only to improve security and create a robust network but also to raise the transaction capacity. However, until blockchain can scale properly it cannot hope to compete against traditional
payment processors capable of handling thousands of transactions per second on an average. At peak capacity, they can process tens of thousands of transactions as well.
An updated scalability roadmap for Waves will be released in due course, detailing how these different methods will allow the platform to achieve the capacity it needs for mass-market adoption.