bloXroute Labs, a technology start-up that built a Blockchain Distribution Network (BDN) to scale all blockchains, announced today the results from their month-long Ethereum (ETH) mining test performed live on the Ethereum mainnet, which shows ETH is able to scale today.
bloXroute partnered with the largest ETH mining pools and full nodes, including SparkPool, F2Pool, BTC.com, to measure network performance with and without bloXroute. The ETH mining test began mid-August following completion of the bloXroute Bitcoin Cash Mining Test.
Dr. Uri Klarman, bloXroute Co-Founder, and CEO, remarked, “Testing bloXroute’s BDN on the ETH mainnet was a natural next step – Ethereum has more actual usage than any other blockchain, and its DApps developers have a real need in processing more transactions at lower fees. Ethereum is processing over 1,000,000 transactions per day, but this is just 0.15% of the capacity needed to compete with traditional payment methods. We went into testing with the goal of showing how, through the use of the BDN, ETH miners can build larger blocks and mine more efficiently by sending and receiving blocks faster – and we did just that.”
The test consisted of two phases; without bloXroute to establish a baseline and with bloXroute to measure performance.
Test participants ran an ETH logger to report blocks mined and their propagation to other participating nodes. During testing, bloXroute collected actual propagation data from roughly 2,000 blocks mined in China and 150 mined in the US to various regions including Asia Pacific, Europe, China, and the US. The results show that overall we saw an average block propagation time of 190ms with the BDN versus 250ms without the BDN, which is a 25% improvement.
Notably, some nodes experienced up to a 100% propagation speed increase with the BDN.
Eyal Markovich, COO, further explained, “We were able to achieve all of our goals, including testing the stability of the network and testing new features added after the previous BCH Mining Test. These results further confirm that the bloXroute BDN will bring both value and scale to the Ethereum network. With a larger gas limit, or larger blocks, we expect to see even more improvements. ”
Non-mining nodes saw a larger improvement compared to miners who have already invested a lot of capital on networking infrastructure, however, a few miners did still see significant block propagation improvements. Prior to the Version 1 launch of the BDN planned for later this year, bloXroute has plans to perform a larger ETH test with more hash power connected to the BDN and potentially test increasing the gas limit using bloXroute’s BDN.
See below a couple of data sets from the test, full results of the initial tests are also available.
