Decentralized startup bloXroute Labs has reduced block propagation time on Ethereum’s Blockchain to half, thus opening doors to scale the network.
According to a Coindesk report on Wednesday, the advancement was revealed by Akomba Labs, a blockchain advisory firm, which ran bloXroute's "Blockchain Distribution Network" (BDN) on an Ethereum node in Singapore between November 11 and November 27. The block propagation time in the node went down to 172 milliseconds from an average time of 360 milliseconds.
Block propagation time is the time a block needs to be produced and shared throughout the blockchain.
Ethereum’s network is one of the largest public blockchains with a higher transaction cost. The study also concluded the effect of BDN on Ethereum’s block propagation and highlighted its cascading effect.
Not easy to scale a network of this size
Mentioning the challenges of Ethereum blockchain, Uri Klarman, chief executive at bloXroute, told the publication: “Ethereum feels the burn of the scalability bottleneck more than any other blockchain out there...It's losing momentum, it's losing market share. They feel the problem. Most others don't.”
The data for the two-week-long test were utilized from a Chinese mining pool.
The report also outlined that the blockchain scaling startup uses a layer 0 solution to reduce transaction size, speeding up block propagation time.
“We don't send the entire block because if the other gateways know the transaction out of there, you don't need to send the actual data itself – only pointers saying which transactions are there,” Klarman added.
bloXroute first started to test BND on Ethereum blockchain in September, resulting in a 25 percent reduction of block propagation time then. The CEO also revealed that the company is already running BDN on large mining pools with plans to scale up its operation.
