Massa Labs
Massa Labs has designed a new blockchain architecture called Blockclique that can handle high transaction throughputs while maintaining decentralization and security. With Blockclique's transaction sharding in a multithreaded block graph, the system can scale up to 10.000 transactions per second. This capacity is comparable to traditional financial systems. Interested parties can also interact with the live testnet.
Current blockchains cannot handle high transaction throughputs similar to classical financial solutions. For instance, Bitcoin allows for only 5 transactions per second, while Ethereum allows for 15-20 transactions per second. In contrast, the VISA system processed 111 billion transactions in 2017 at an average of 3.500 transactions per second. That highlights the limitations of current blockchains stemming from their design, which makes consensus challenging. The Nakamoto consensus rule rates each chain of the block tree by assigning it a scalar fitness, and produces new blocks by extending the chain of maximum fitness.
Increasing the transaction rate in a naive way by increasing the block frequency or size is not effective. Increasing block frequency or size leads to nodes creating many incompatible blocks, resulting in high fork rates and consensus failures. However, Massa's Blockclique architecture offers a solution to this problem. Massa extended the Nakamoto consensus rule to the case of parallel blocks, enabling a secure and decentralized consensus using Proof-of-Stake.
Overall, Massa's new blockchain architecture can handle thousands of transactions per second, providing a viable alternative to classical financial solutions.