EOS Now Doing More Transactions Than SWIFT

Blockchain has come a long way in the past few years. However, the Bitcoin scaling debate has left a lot to be desired. Bitcoin and has come up against a brick wall in terms of its throughput, it cannot seem to surpass 900,000 transactions per day. Ethereum has had issues of its own topping out at 1,300,000 tx/day. The ability to achieve a slightly higher throughput than Bitcoin may be due to the fact that Ethereum doesn’t have a block size limit, but rather a gas limit which is flexible to some extent. Ethereum is transitioning to a proof-of-stake governance which will most likely improve its throughput. [1]

What’s extremely impressive is EOS, the project that launched in June 2018, is already processing 40,000,000 tx/day which is more than both SWIFT and the CCP. SWIFT is the international messaging system that banks and financial institutions use to send cross-boarder payments as well as settle foreign currency trades. SWIFT currently processes 25,000,000 tx/per day. EOS is also outperforming Bachs Payment Schemes Limited, which is the largest ACH* processor in the United Kingdom and handles roughly 25,000,000 tx/day. [2] EOS operates using the delegated-proof-of-stake governance structure called Graphene. Graphene and dPOS are also used by the Steemit and the Bitshares blockchains as well as the inspiration for a few other blockchain projects such as WAX and Lisk. It’s no wonder that dPOS projects all hold the top four spots on Blocktivity.info, a website that tracks how many transactions are processed by the leading public blockchains.

These days it seems like the title of “peer-to-peer digital cash” belongs not to Bitcoin but to EOS as it is already performing better than most legacy payment systems. I would like to state for the record that the number refers not just to transfers of ownership of EOS tokens, but all other transactions that are considered “operations” which would include transactions done on decentralized applications that run on top of EOS which are added to the blockchain. Everipedia, for example, is a blockchain version of Wikipedia; an update to this database could be considered a transaction. So not all transactions are token transfers, in fact, it is rumored that the majority of EOS’ transaction are currently the operations of the multiple gambling apps that have been built on EOS. I don’t think however that this distracts from the point. Whether it is a dApp operation or an actual token transfer, both are legitimate on-chain transactions that are recorded. The same can be said for the SWIFT system, as it does not only transmit messages for cross boarder payments but also confirms FOREX trades. Also note that SWIFT does not settle or clear transaction as opposed to EOS which essentially does.

At this point all blockchains are far from close to their goal of replacing credit cards as the major payment system. Besides cash, payment cards, such as those maintained by Visa and Mastercard are responsible for the majority of micropayments worldwide. In the United States, 55% of the total value of consumer purchases are processed with payment cards with 28% being done with credit, and 27% with debit. [Ibid]

The next obvious milestone to beat is “VisaNet,” Visa’s card processing network which claims to process 150 million daily transactions worldwide. Which means that EOS’ current throughput would need to at least triple from where it is now. This is something to watch for in the coming years in the crypto-currency world. [3]

Sources:

[1] https://www.blocktivity.info/
[2] Duran, Randall E. Financial Services Technology. Cengage Learning Asia Pte Ltd, 2018.
[3] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visanet-technology/visa-net-booklet.pdf

*ACH stands for Automated Clearing House, which is an electronic payment network