The Scalability of Steem Blockchain

Scalability can be defined as the ability of a blockchain to handle increasing numbers of transactions, as it becomes popular and still provide efficient and reliable transactions on its blockchain. I don’t have to tell anyone how popular that Bitcoin has become and how frequently the Bitcoin blockchain is being used, as more and more people around the world utilize the Bitcoin to store and transfer wealth, and use Bitcoin as an investment vehicle. Ethereum is also very popular and hosts may decentralized applications and some of them like “Crypto Kitties” are very popular, and they generate an enormous amount of blockchain transaction traffic. Because of their popularity people have seen the issues that both Bitcoin and Ethereum experienced once they reached the limits of their ability to conduct fast transactions; transactions on these blockchains first started to slow and then in the case of Ethereum they actually appeared to stop and stack up with some smaller transactions taking over 24 hours at one point.

These delays caused much unhappiness and people started using other blockchains to transfer wealth from Point A to Point B; such as the Litecoin blockchain or Dash. People converted their coins to Litecoin or Dash, transferred them to an exchange where they wanted to do business, then converted them Back to Bitcoin and then transacted their business. This is a somewhat convoluted process, which cost both time and money, as people paid transaction fees to convert Bitcoin to Litecoin, then transaction fees to transfer their new Litecoin, then transaction fees on the other end when they converted Litecoin back to Bitcoin. This process also exposed people to the risk of entering the wrong wallet address and losing all the money they were transferring. An occurrence which is uncommon but usually means your cryptocurrency is lost forever. These issue made “scalability” a frequent topic of debate and many solutions were proposed, one called “Lightening” for Bitcoin and other solutions were proposed for Ethereum.

So you can probably imagine that when I found an article about the “scalability” of Steem, I was very interested to hear what an “outside party” (someone with no apparent vested interest in Steem and thus assumed to be impartial and objective), had to say. I read an article by a computer software concern called Infinity Stones, which took a technical look at the Steem blockchain in regard to its ability to handle transaction traffic on its blockchain and specifically address the issue of regarding the issue of “scalability”, or Steem’s ability to handle increased traffic on it’s blockchain as its user base and blockchain traffic increases. This is what I read:

Steem has shown for over the past 3 years that it can handle traffic on social media site steemit.com. To assess the network’s scalability, we can benchmark it against Reddit’s traffic volume and determine if it will survive. First, let’s calculate how many transactions Reddit was handling on its site. In 2015, Reddit’s 8.7 million users generated 73.15 million new posts and 725.85 million new comments, for an average of 2 posts per second and 23 comments per second. Also, there were 6.89 billion upvotes which is equivalent to an average of 218.5 upvotes per seconds. In total, reddit.com was registering an average of 245 transactions per second. Second, we need to know the actual capacity of Steem. The Steem blockchain is built upon Graphene which powers the decentralized, blockchain-based asset exchange Bitshares. Graphene has been tested that it can maintain over 1,000 TPS on a distributed test network. The technology has the potential to scale to 10,000 or more TPS with relatively straightforward upgrades on server capacity and communication protocols. As of today, the TPS on Steem blockchain is ~18.441 tx/sec according to SteemDB, meaning Steem only uses about 2% of its total capacity.Thus, Steem is more than capable of handling transactions of large websites like reddit.com and has room left for sudden spikes in the number of transactions as well as upgrade potential when needed.<

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As you can imagine, I was very happy after reading this article and thought I would share it. Its an old article with statistics dated 2015. But I see that as a plus not a minus, because since this article was published, the number of applications on the Steem blockchain has grown and so far we are still experiencing fast transactions with no signs of slowing, so I feel this validates the article.

References for Reddit Numbers
[1] Blockchain Activity Matrix, http://blocktivity.info/
[2] Reddit Statistics, https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/reddit-stats/2/

Infinity Stones is a Silicon Valley based company, providing cloud management services and security solutions for Blockchains. To learn more about them you can contact them here:

Twitter: twitter.com/infstones
Telegram: t.me/infstones
Facebook: facebook.com/infinity.stones.12327
Medium: https://medium.com/infinity-stones