Scalability, security, and decentralisation – the "blockchain trilemma " states that you can only have two. But you may no longer have to choose, as proven by Amsterdam-based startup mintBlue's record-breaking transaction rate, which is sure to alter the playing field for the public enterprise blockchain industry.
On March 15th, mintBlue made history by executing 50.53 million transactions within 24 hours on the public blockchain, eclipsing the daily transaction averages of mainstream blockchains such as Ethereum (1.2 million per day) and BTC (300k per day). Even popular online payment methods like iDEAL (2.4 million per day) and Ayden (33 million per day) have been left in the dust.
The ability to handle high transaction volumes without costing a fortune is a critical factor for many blockchain use cases and has been a historic hurdle for the industry. With mintBlue's success, public blockchain technology has just become significantly more accessible to an enterprise audience enabling cross-sector collaboration.
Making Proof-of-Work work
Blockchain technology, especially Proof-of-Work (PoW), has long been associated with high costs and limited scalability. Why? Take Bitcoin (BTC) – the most visible PoW example.
With the BTC blockchain, each block in the chain is limited in size and frequency, with a 1 megabyte block created on average every 10 minutes, thus processing 7 transactions per second. In other words, it can only accommodate so much information in a certain amount of time. Accordingly, high demand brings congestion, namely more transactions than space in a block. If you want your transaction to go through as soon as possible, expect to pay for the privilege through higher fees. Alternatively, it can take hours, days, and even weeks for a transaction to go through, depending on activity – hardly a viable basis for a reliable system.
With its high transaction volume handling, in part made possible by leveraging massively larger blocks, mintBlue's world record proves that the public blockchain can be both scalable and cost-efficient.
“The record was about showing, rather than telling the world that there is no such thing as a blockchain trilemma: scale, security and decentralisation go hand in hand on the public enterprise blockchain.” – Niels van den Bergh, CEO, mintBlue
Many think larger blocks are against the nature of decentralisation as it leads to an open, competitive market for data centres to verify the network." says van den Bergh, "This critique has been spun up by the crypto side of blockchain that dominates the headlines. Decentralisation has been taken out of context and is - in network topology - a means to achieve absolute network resilience. Furthermore, the word is not mentioned once in the original blockchain whitepaper.”
Putting those millions of transactions to work
mintBlue's blockchain technology offers a wide range of solutions in specific use cases such as e-invoicing, e-signatures, data provenance, immutable storage, and more. What's more impressive is that even an enterprise-grade implementation doesn't require specialized development. An enterprise integration can be achieved within two hours on average, thanks to their user-friendly API, SDK, and Zapier integrations. Major organizations such as Visma | yuki and the Dutch Chamber of Commerce (KVK) already making use of tools like fraud-proof e-invoicing.
Allowing for immutable on-chain storage is particularly cool, as it allows the entirety of data to be stored on the blockchain, without the need for third parties – something the overwhelming majority of blockchains can't handle. Mainstream blockchains often resort to centralized cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and with IPFS, which doesn’t guarantee data-persistance. Immutable storage on the public blockchain can be useful for data-intensive industries that require high levels of data security, such as healthcare, finance, and government. The distributed nature of the public blockchain means there is no ‘single point of failure’ that can be exploited or hacked into. Organisations have sole access to the locations and keys of their data, enabling absolute data ownership. They decide with whom to share, and no one else can reach their data (not even mintBlue).
"We're excited to invite individuals and enterprises alike to experience the power of our secure, scalable blockchain technology," says Niels van den Bergh, CEO of mintBlue. "With our ability to handle high transaction volumes efficiently and cost-effectively, we believe we can be the go-to solution for blockchain features with real on-chain storage. We welcome everyone to test and experience mintBlue, and discover its many possibilities for data ownership, authentication, and provenance."
Being highly affordable at scale, mintBlue costs just a fraction of the price of other leading blockchain technologies. This provides an opportunity for smaller businesses and even individuals to leverage the power of blockchain technology without breaking the bank, though larger enterprises and even countries will certainly be the main benefactors – the Central Bank of Norway has determined that mintBlue’s underlying blockchain protocol is the most suitable option for a national digital currency. It’s why the public blockchain mintBlue uses is dubbed ‘the enterprise blockchain’.
“Crypto is about speculating on tokens and starting new networks on a whim to have an excuse to issue another speculative token asset. Enterprise blockchain is about finding actual realistic use cases revolving around provenance, authenticity, monetisation and absolute data control." – Niels van den Bergh, CEO, mintBlue
What blockchain was supposed to be
While blockchain projects eagerly spill ink over being ‘a single source of truth’, the absence of key elements to achieve that, namely scalability and usability, means that this vision has remained out of reach for most. This has led to thousands of seperate networks that all want to be that ‘single source’, leading to interoperability challenges that result in many exploits, hacks, illegal security offerings and other cybercrime. And even for those who have found their applicability, i.e. Ethereum, the scale and affordability demonstrated by mintBlue simply isn't possible through its inherently limited account-based system.
“We're proud to have accomplished what was once thought impossible - processing a record-breaking number of transactions on a proof of work blockchain at an unprecedented scale. We're excited to lead the charge in proving that blockchain technology can be a cost-effective and efficient solution for businesses seeking to improve data ownership and provenance.” – Pieter Den Dooven, Chief Innovation Officer, mintBlue
Using mintBlue's Software Development Kit (SDK), native blockchain storage and functionality are available with a switch of a button in existing user interfaces. It makes it easy to integrate with existing infrastructure and does not require the workforce to switch to new environments – a much-needed level of simplicity and speed that may be key to opening the floodgates for mass adoption.
Breaking records and misconceptions
50 million transactions in 24 hours on a public blockchain is a landmark achievement for the company and industry at large. For anyone still hung up on outdated myths about blockchain technology, this should be a wake-up call – absolute control over your data no longer comes at a steep technological cost.
See for yourself – anyone can prototype their own blockchain solution and put data on-chain in just 20 minutes, using the mintBlue console here.
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