Who Scales it Best: Visa, PayPal, or XinFin?
The major financial giants compare against each other in terms of transaction speed.
In April 2019, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, processed its 400th million transactions. Many more such stats show that the last three years were extraordinarily growth-oriented for the blockchain and cryptocurrency space. With an expected CAGR of 76% between 2019 to 2022, there are high expectations from blockchain technology in the coming years.
But before we could stand true to those expectations and bring them from the conceptual form to its real form, there are some major architectural problems with blockchain technology that needs tackling.
Ever since cryptocurrencies started spreading across a wider audience, blockchain and cryptocurrency pioneers are faced with the problem of leveraging blockchain’s maximum scalability. They have kept working on better consensus protocol that would help attain better transaction speed for the blockchain.
As Deloitte Insights puts it, “blockchain-based systems are comparatively slow. Blockchain’s sluggish transaction speed is a major concern for enterprises that depend on high-performance legacy transaction processing systems.”
Why We Need High Scalability
Almost 83% of enterprises plan to integrate blockchain into their business. These enterprises would rely on high throughput of various blockchains so that they can efficiently exchange value and data over the secure system that is blockchain.
There’s a dire need for such blockchains with higher transaction speed. From that perspective, blockchains such as bitcoin and ethereum do not make the cut as they are tremendously slow.
Let’s go through how the major financial giants compare against each other in terms of transaction speed.
Visa
Visa is one of the largest multinational financial services corporation with over 1.1 billion credit cards in circulation. Having been in this industry for quite longer than all others, it boasts of an exceptional transaction speed of more than 1,700 transactions per second.
There’s a famous stat that suggests that Visa is capable of handling 24,000 transactions per second. However, the truth is far from it. As an article on Bitcoin.com mentions, the figure is “not even remotely accurate.”
Bitcoin
It was with Bitcoin that the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry gained its initial push. It is a peer to peer decentralized network for people to transact value without the intervention of any intermediary.
Put into use in 2009, bitcoin blockchain has a considerably lower transaction speed of around 7 TPS. Many argue that bitcoin was never actually meant to have a high transaction speed or more precisely, it wasn’t meant to replace the traditional system of exchanging value.
PayPal
Found in 2002, PayPal was one of the first companies to pioneer the concept of online payments. After 17 years in the business, PayPal currently can handle 193 transactions per second. Though not a very huge number, PayPal has maintained a high status amidst all financial giants.
Ripple
Ripple has caused ripples across not only the blockchain sector but across the whole of tech industry with its remarkable performance. Slightly behind the finance oligarch Visa, Ripple gives a tight competition with an average of 1,500 transactions per second.
XinFin Network
XinFin is a considerably newer project that is an enterprise-ready hybrid blockchain for global trade and finance. Despite being new, XinFin has practically proven that it is more scalable than the others mentioned above and is a fit for enterprises to leverage the full potential of blockchain. Live network : https://XinFin.Network
At present, the XinFin network is capable of mustering 2,000 transactions per second, which is higher than the renowned Ripple network as well as Visa. As per the XinFin community social media discussion they are continuously trying to improve upto 40,000TPS using sharding technology.
Conclusion
As already mentioned, enterprises need high scalability to not only efficiently transfer monetary value but also securely store and share data and other forms of digital assets. It will only be when we adopt the right blockchain networks that deal with the scalability issue that we can reach a wider audience and make blockchain a mainstream phenomenon.
