Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao says he disagrees with Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s recent comments on blockchain scalability.
In an interview with The Star, Buterin said the speed and cost of blockchain transactions remain the biggest challenge facing blockchain technology.
“The main problem with the current blockchain is this idea that every computer has to verify every transaction. If we can move to networks where every computer on average verifies only a small portion of transactions then it can be done better.”
In response, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao issued a tweet saying newer blockchains have already successfully pushed blockchain transaction volume and speed to acceptable levels.
“I like Vitalik and ETH, but speed and capacity was a problem a year ago, but now a largely solved problem for newer blockchains (for now). We need to increase real applications that people actually use, so that we hit the new capacity issues/limits again. Focus on applications.”
Buterin quickly countered, saying recent attempts to beef up blockchain speed are too centralized, citing EOS as an example.
“It’s not solved at all. Even the newer semi-centralized blockchains have TPS in the hundreds; AFAIK EOS has already had scalability bottleneck issues.”
Hundreds of comments poured in, sparking a rigorous technical discussion about orphan blocks, nodes, Raspberry Pi, reorgs and how to solve the holy grail of scalability without sacrificing security and decentralization.
The team at MetaHash countered that their next-generation blockchain outperforms Buterin’s assumptions.
Supporters of GoChain, Skycoin, Elrond, EOS and HPB (High Performance Blockchain) all affirmed that solutions are available.
Buterin also says he’s becoming increasingly doubtful that second-layer solutions like the Lightning Network are the best solution to boost the speed and lower the cost of transactions.
He highlighted Bitcoin SV as a more scalable solution.
Binance launched its own blockchain, called Binance Chain, in April of this year. Zhao says it can handle about 2,000 transactions per second. In contrast, the Ethereum blockchain currently supports roughly 15 transactions per second. However, Binance Chain is not designed to support smart contracts, a key factor in its ability to support higher transaction volume.
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