Bloxroute
The limiting factor of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is their network. Specifically, they employ a trustless P2P network model to propagate transactions and blocks, which does not scale as the volume of transactions increases, a fact research has shown time and again. Indeed, if blocks and transactions were to be instantly propagated, immense blocks could have been mined at a rapid pace, until the limitation of designated processing units and flash storage arrays was reached.
To overcome this limitation, and to allow all cryptocurrencies to scale to thousands of on-chain transactions per second today, we propose bloXroute, a provably neutral transport layer which runs underneath cryptocurrencies. bloXroute allows to safely increase the block size and to cut down the time interval between blocks, without increasing the risk of forks, and provides real-time support for immediate transactions with zero-confirmation (0-conf). It is compatible with any off-chain scaling solutions, complementary to the native consensus protocol used, and can be gradually deployed by any node wishing to receive blocks at a higher rate. With the networking bottleneck removed, each cryptocurrency community is free to adjust its protocol to best leverage this newfound capacity, in order to increase its real-world impact and value.
Scaling cryptocurrencies by a factor of x1,000 and more benefits the entire ecosystem: as an example, reducing user fees by a factor of x100, increasing the total fees collected by miners by a factor of x10, and awarding bloXroute a payment for the transactions it enables to maintain its sustainability.
Demonstrate several studies that show it’s the P2P propagation that is orders of magnitude more restrictive than CPU I/O. It’s insufficient for wide real-world adoption. Increasing the block size increases propagation time and long times causes blockchains to unravel. Reducing inter-block time interval causes the exact same effect as increasing block size. No chain can scale significantly based on the existing P2P methods.
Related Work
- Deployment of centralized Bitcoin relay networks
- Bitcoin Fast Relay Network (FIBRE)
- Falcon
- Off-chain Scaling
- lightning-network, TeeChan, etc. - these are complimentary
- On-Chain Scaling
- Sharing, Bitcoin-NG, PoS-based approaches: Casper, Algorand
Technology
The bloXroute BDN uses several networking techniques (e.g. internal caching, cut-through routing, optimized topology, and dynamic route selection) for transaction and block propagation that is significantly faster than existing techniques.
The bloXroute BDN is comprised of fast relay servers, client Gateways and SDN (software defined network) component which coordinates the control plane.
Connecting to the bloXroute BDN is easy. All you need to do is download the client Gateway (docker or pip) and run it next to your blockchain node. Simply point the gateway to the blockchain node and that’s it!