The new blockchain system developed by computer scientists at NYU breaks performance records by processing more than 5 million transactions every two seconds, which is 100 times faster than the closest competitors using a small fraction of the energy.
The system, called Bounce, represents fundamental to traditional blockchain design, which greatly improves speed by using satellites orbiting the Earth, while eliminating many security holes.
“The advantage of satellites is that they are difficult to obtain, prevent side channel attacks, and make their processing resistant to tampering,” a study published in the MDPI Network, a professor of computer science and research journal at the Courant School of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.
In a jump system, the code of the transaction arrives at the specified satellite within a specific time period. The satellite then ordered the transactions and “bounced” them back to Earth, creating a clear sequence to prevent the possibility of blockchain “forks” – platforms in the ledger can enable dual-spend attacks.
The research team, including undergraduate Liu and former graduate student Taegyun Kim (now Datadog), conducted experiments using CloudLab infrastructure to communicate with satellites based on tests with the International Space Station.
What distinguishes the rebound from existing blockchain systems is not only its speed, but its excellent efficiency. The system consumes less than 0.05 joules of energy per transaction, while Solana (currently considered one of the fastest blockchains) has over 1,000 joules, and the focus for bitcoin transactions is over one million.
Performance improvements solve the long-term limitations of blockchain technology. Although Bitcoin introduced blockchain into mainstream awareness in 2009, most systems still struggled with limiting the slow transaction speed and high energy costs of practical applications.
“The bounce protocol on satellite computers is so simple that it can be etched into read memory, thus preventing software injection attacks,” Shasha noted.
For users, the system promises transaction confirmation time of only 3 to 10 seconds, which is consistent with traditional credit card processing. The researchers also designed a two-tier service model whose “advanced” transactions are processed faster than “economic” transactions.
In addition to increasing speed, Bounce’s satellite-based approach provides hackers with a natural advantage. Satellites travel hundreds of kilometers on Earth, making physical channels nearly impossible and creating natural broadcast capabilities, thus enhancing security against communication disruption.
The study was supported by NYU Wireless, an academic research center at the Tandon School of Engineering at NYU, which could advance wireless technology. Shasha warned that “real world deployments may present some practical challenges,” Shasha believed that “bounce lays the foundation for future research and development of high-performance, energy-efficient, globally accessible blockchain systems.”
For an industry struggling to overcome performance constraints, this celestial approach to blockchain may represent the breakthrough required to ultimately make distributed ledger technology practical.
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