Ethereum Will Achieve 1 Million Transactions Per Second – Vitalik Buterin
The creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, explained in a recent OmiseGO AMA session that with second-layer solutions such as Sharding and Plasma, the Ethereum network will eventually be able to process 1 million transactions per second and potentially more than 100 million transactions per second.
Previously, at various conferences and presentations, Buterin emphasized that the Ethereum blockchain protocol and decentralized blockchain networks, in general, are struggling to deal with scalability issues.
Buterin in 2017 noted that bitcoin and Ethereum have been processing three to six transactions per second at peak capacity. He added that for the blockchain to support large-scale payment networks such as Visa, stock markets like Nasdaq, and Internet of Things (IoT) networks, it will have to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.
Buterin said: “Bitcoin is currently processing a bit less than three transactions per second and if it goes close to four, it is already at peak capacity. Ethereum has been doing five per second and if it goes above six, then it is also at peak capacity. On the other hand, Uber on average does 12 rides per second, PayPal several hundred, Visa several thousand, major stock exchanges tens of thousands, and in IoT, you’re talking hundreds of thousands per second,”
At the OmiseGO AMA session, Buterin stated that second-layer scaling solutions that are currently being tested on the Ethereum testnet could enable the Ethereum blockchain network to support large-scale decentralized applications with millions of users by taking an innovative approach in optimizing the blockchain.
Sharding splits a blockchain network to shards which are then equipped with a group of nodes that are tasked to process information of certain shards.
“The reason I think layer 1 and layer 2 networks are complementary is because ultimately, if you look at the math, the scalability gains from the layer 1 improvements and layer 2 improvements do ultimately multiply with each other. If you have a Sharding solution, the Sharding solution itself might increase the scalability of Ethereum by a factor of 100, or eventually even more. But then, if you do Plasma on top of the scalability solution, then what that means is, you’re not just doing 100 times of the amount of activity but you are doing 100 times the amount of entrances, the amount of exits, and despite resolutions,” explained Buterin.