The MultiversX smart contract platform can potentially enhance the transaction throughput of existing layer-2 blockchain networks by up to 100 times.
The significant scalability boost is enabled through MultiversX’s recently introduced Sovereign Chains, a blockchain-as-a-service solution allowing existing L2s to inherit the scalability MultiversX.
By leveraging Sovereign Chains, existing L2 networks can increase their transactions per second (TPS) and smart contract TPS by up to 100 times, according to Beniamin Mincu, CEO and co-founder at MultiversX.
Mincu told Cointelegraph:
“Sovereign Chains have countless innovations and hardcore engineering behind them to reach such speeds with relatively inexpensive machines - 20 validator nodes running on 16 cores (~4.7GHz), 64GB RAM, 1TB NVME SSD (but we only used 10 cores for processing).”
Scalability and high transaction throughput are essential for realizing blockchain technology’s potential in real-world use cases such as micropayments, which require a network to settle thousands of transactions quickly and cheaply.
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Will L2s reach 100,000 TPS via Sovereign Chains?
During the inaugural demonstration of the public Sovereign Chain, the network achieved a throughput of 77,000 TPS. This performance is nearly 77 times faster than the maximum real-world throughput of Solana, the industry leader, which stands at 1,053 TPS.
The MultiversX team is now focused on unlocking the 100,000 TPS threshold, according to Mincu:
“The demo for the first public Sovereign Chain reached a peak of 77,000 TPS, and there is ongoing work to increase this to over 100,000 […] It boils down to optimizations at every step, from consensus to networking to the whole journey of transaction processing.”
However, unlocking similar throughput in real-world scenarios is challenging, as evidenced by Solana, which, according to CoinGecko, was only able to achieve 1.6% of its maximum theoretical throughput of 65,000 TPS.
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Interoperability will open the true potential of permissionless blockchains
Beyond increasing throughput, Sovereign Chains can also increase the interoperability of L2s built on top of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana.
This type of native interoperability underpinned by chain abstraction can open the true potential of decentralized blockchain networks, according to Mincu:
“To be able to jump from one application to another, regardless of the originating chain. And to do so with a consistent user experience, transforming infrastructures into invisible layers that are just backends working in the background without the user needing to know the particularities of each other.”
The fragmentation of the current blockchain ecosystem is making decentralized finance protocols difficult to use. Users need to bridge assets across cross-chain bridges to interact with other blockchains.
However, Sovereign Chains aim to make the L2s on the leading blockchains more interoperable for both builders and end-users. Mincu explained:
“With Sovereign Chains we are working towards making global any asset, protocol, community, capital, and opportunity present in Web3. So that they become composable, usable and accessible from anywhere by anyone that is on-chain.”