A New World Record! 50 Million Transactions In 24 Hours

ANTWERP – 16 March 2023

mintBlue just set a new World Record: we pushed the largest volume of transactions (a casual 50.53 Million) in 24 hours onto the public blockchain.

If you’re a CEO, or new to the blockchain world, this may not mean much to you, yet. You probably had to read that number twice if you’re reading this from within the blockchain bubble. Jaws may or may not have been dropped, but why is this a big deal? 

First, it presents a definitive counterargument to the ‘blockchain trilemma’, a term popularised by Ethereum Founder Vitaly Buterin. We proved the opposite is true. We call it The Blockchain Trifecta.
Second, it exhibits the public blockchain, and mintBlue’s ability to operate on it, at an unprecedented scale. 

To put the transaction load in context, we processed 20 times more transactions than iDeal and Adyen do combined, on an average day. All of that, at a mere fraction of the cost, compared to any other blockchain technology. 

We’ll go into more detail below as to why this matters, as well as the specifics of the world record. If the stats above piqued your interest, you might be curious about how this technology can be applied to your industry. We’ll cover that too.

Jump to world record stats!

What is the public blockchain? 

Before we explore the details of the world record and divulge use cases in different industries, let’s make sure we’re all speaking the same language.

The public blockchain is an open network, in stark contrast to a private blockchain (which is a closed network). The public blockchain is a shared database that allows anyone to privately store and exchange information without dependency on a trusted third party (like Big Tech).

The public blockchain has the advantage of protecting privacy and safeguarding a tamper-proof data trail. It offers the advantage of transparency and the possibility to verify transactions without compromising privacy. It is equipped against attacks, and data is unchangeable, which makes it fraud-resistant.   

What is Proof of Work and why does it matter? 

Proof of Work (PoW) is the consensus mechanism that is used to get transactions on the public blockchain. PoW is a competition based on computational work: all the nodes are competing to prove their work first. They prove their work by doing basic calculations to verify transactions, which then get added to the blockchain. 

By pushing the largest number of transactions ever on a public blockchain, we stress-test and prove the technical capability of our infrastructure. 

The world record

During our 24-hour event on the 15th of March 2023, we published 50.53 million documents on-chain. 
With this record, we set out to show, rather than tell. So we’ll dive right in with the stats.

As a startup serving large corporate clients, we value proof points of our scaling capabilities. 

Instead of asking them nicely to trust us, we took it as an opportunity to stress test our infrastructure and prove our abilities while doing it. The proof is in the eating of the pudding, right? As a cherry on top, we’re casually making blockchain history. 

Proving scalability and affordability go hand in hand

What’s the message behind these stats? It’s undeniable proof of the public blockchain’s capability of scale and affordability. 

1. Prove the public blockchain is able to scale. 

This showcases three main technical capabilities:

• We throughput the highest Transactions per Second (TPS).

• We transfer real data files and automate regulatory markup on-chain. In this stress test, each transaction contained documents, such as contracts, credentials, invoices, micropayments and receipts.
• We can support a sustained transaction load.

2. Prove the public blockchain is affordable. 

On the business side of it, it proves our affordability for large enterprise use cases. 

• We can support use cases that are high data volumes and large transaction loads. 
• We offer a viable solution in regard to both transaction costs and the lack of high capital and operational investment cost. 
• We not only achieve this at a fraction of the business cost but also the environmental cost. This 50 million transaction experiment only incurred €400 in fees. 

Sure, this shattered existing blockchain records. More importantly, though, it broke any record of existing alternatives (for example iDeal/Adyen) on two fronts. It showcases that our capability far outpaces incumbents’ technology, both in scalability as in affordability.

The comparison to existing alternatives is crucial. Any CEO will wonder how viable it is to add blockchain capabilities, as it might bloat their existing infrastructure’s economic model. It’s a fair concern, as capital expenditure investments and operating costs commonly associated with mainstream blockchains usually bloat the bill so much, it becomes one of the largest hurdles. 

This stress test would’ve cost multitudes on mainstream alternatives like Ethereum and Hyperledger. It cost us a mere fraction of its fees (€400). The rest of the cost is wrapped in our mintBlue infrastructure. The economic model of the public blockchain just. makes. sense. It’s why it’s dubbed the enterprise blockchain. And why failed blockchain projects rise like a Phoenix when it finds out about its viability.

As far as ecological concerns go, this stress test emitted a total of 55 Metric Tons of CO₂, which was offset by planting trees through our integration partner Sumting. For more insight on how blockchain emissions compare, take a look at our Blockchain Sustainability Index. 

Why are you the first to break the record, if the technology was just… there? 

TL;DR: blockchain gets a bad rap based on a myth called ‘the blockchain trilemma’. 

The blockchain trilemma theorizes about limitations plaguing blockchain protocols. It poses that you always need to trade off at least one of the three limitations: scale, decentralisation, and security.  

This was primarily a clever of market-making move: create problems, and then offer a whole category of layered solutions to bypass them. If we go back to the original versions of the public blockchain, we see this is a non-problem there. Actually, it’s a strength. We call it the Public Blockchain Trifecta. 

Introducing The Public Blockchain Trifecta: 

• Permissionless Resilience: Part of the trilemma misinformation campaign is to skew the perception of the value of decentralization. There’s no single definition of decentralization, which is often used as an umbrella term. Its meaning differs: in crypto contexts, it refers to democratic governance and decentralized transaction processing. 
  
  In the public blockchain context, it refers to network resilience and permissionless access. This is where the real value of decentralization, in our definition of it, becomes obvious.  
  
  A decentralized network topology ensures greater network resilience. With professional data centres competing for uptime, 99,999% uptime is achieved.
  
  Given the public blockchain protocol is public and permissionless, any data centre can join and leave the network at will, without any gatekeepers.
  
  These two interpretations of decentralization ultimately forge a healthier network. ‘Permissionless Resilience’ is our proposal for a contextualized definition of decentralization.
  

• Security: The public blockchain network can be verified independently, without any bottlenecks. Data centres keep each other in check in exchange for transaction fees.
  
  What’s unique about the public blockchain, is that security is baked into its economic model: it’s just not economically viable to orchestrate attacks or fraud. 
  

• Scale: on the public blockchain, blocks are unbounded. On most blockchains, the scale is limited by block size, but on the public blockchain it’s not. The large block size combined with the ability to run through professional data centres (as we have, in this experiment), ensures that it’s built for scale.
  
  This is the point we proved by pushing the largest amount of transactions on any blockchain ever. 

What this means (potentially) for our clients/you  

Let’s translate this to your context.

The public blockchain has a clear, yet wide applicability: 

• Storing data in an immutable infrastructure,
  Benefit: ultimate uptime (with no regress costs) of tamper-proof data
  
• Sending data in a secure, privacy-compliant manner
  Benefit: reduce data leaks and liability, enable Continuous Transaction Control  
  
• Timestamping data and authenticating identities
  Benefit: avoid fraud and increase authenticity

With an enterprise implementation averaging at about two hours for the technical implementation in a single corporation, blockchain use cases are more accessible than ever. Consortia, one of the most time-intensive activities, with a traditionally heavy capital expenditure, can be built progressively as costs are insignificant on the public blockchain. You can introduce a new standard and shared data layer, fully compliant with privacy and security standards and onboard stakeholders as part of a roadmap, rather than a big-bang approach.

The use of the public blockchain enables (adversarial) interoperability, which is currently a large inhibitor of innovation. Without Big Tech middlemen, and with mintBlue’s lack of a vendor lock-in, you and your organization have full ownership. Finally, absolute data control!

Example applications of the public blockchain 

mintBlue provides easy-to-use access to the public blockchain infrastructure, so you can easily build your own blockchain solutions. It can be applied to any industry, but make sure to keep an eye on our live and upcoming solutions in e-invoicing, e-signatures, social impact and immutable storage. 

What would you do if you were able to leverage the public blockchain? Here are some ideas: 

• 50 million UBL invoices authenticated and transfered between bookkeepers.
  This was our payload, inspired by our recent implementation with our client VISMA|yuki.  
• 50 million MBs or 50 Terabytes immutably stored, at a fraction of the cost of cloud storage, superpowered with plenty of blockchain’s value-adds.  
• 50 million identities authenticated. You could authenticate every inhabitant of Belgium and Netherlands in half a day = +/- 20 mio inhabitants)
• 50 million coffee bags traced to their provenance, enabling impact revenue models. 
• 50 million receipts distributed securely to accounting systems. Imagine having a retail Point-of-Sale system fully integrated with customer touchpoints and back-end accounting.  

Take us for a 2-minute spin

Our whole value proposition is that we make it easy for anyone to build on the public blockchain. Our console is a plug-and-play tool, that is open to anyone to try. But you don’t need to take our word for it. 

We invite:  

• CEOs and non-technical profiles to watch this 2 minute walkthrough. This will give you a feel of how it works, and why we feel comfortable claiming it’s ease-of-use.
  
• Anyone, especially non-blockchain developers, to build your blockchain prototype in 20 min with our console. The point-and-click experience makes it easy for anyone to put data on chain.
  Need some inspiration for what to put on-chain? Try the cliché ‘hello world’. 

Curious to see what’s next for mintBlue?