At the IBM Think conference in San Francisco, Samsung SDS revealed that it has developed Accelerator software that is capable of speeding up Hyperledger Fabric transactions by as much as ten times.
Bitcoin is widely known to be very slow and only capable of seven transactions per second (TPS). However, enterprise blockchains don’t use Proof of Work and hence are much faster. Last February tests showed Fabric could reach 3,500 TPS and more recent experiments point to 20,000 TPS.
Nonetheless, compared to conventional databases, blockchains are slow. So this is a fertile area for research. The reason for the speed challenge is that the content lives on multiple servers and there has to be consensus about the transactions that are added.
To ensure the correct ordering, blockchains process transactions one after the other.
The order of transactions is critical. Imagine Alice sells Bob thirty shares in ABCDco and the blockchain processes the settlement. Bob immediately sells those shares on to Charlie. If instead there was an attempt to process Bob’s sale to Charlie first, the transaction would fail, because as far as the ledger is concerned, Bob does not yet own the ABCDco shares.
Samsung SDS’s solution is to process multiple transactions together. Doing things in parallel in software isn’t especially novel. And this can trigger the problem of failing Bob’s transaction because the ordering can’t be guaranteed. But Samsung’s approach is to filter transactions and only process transactions together if they do not correlate. In this example, the transactions processed simultaneously would involve neither the same people nor shares.
Technically the solution batches the uncorrelated transactions into a single new transaction. Samsung has shared a whitepaper about the new methodology.
Samsung SDS is the IT arm of the Korean technology company Samsung with revenues in 2018 of 13.3 trillion won ($11.8 billion). The company developed its own enterprise blockchain platform Nexledger and found that the Nexledger Accelerator technology is compatible with Hyperledger Fabric. Hence, subject to validation by the open source community, the plan is to incorporate Accelerator into Hyperledger Fabric which is IBM’s blockchain of choice.
Ted Kim, VP Blockchain Team from Samsung SDS America has been appointed to the IBM Blockchain Board of Advisors. And Samsung SDS is to become a go-to-market reseller partner for IBM Blockchain in Korea.
Samsung SDS is involved in a number of high profile blockchain projects. For example, a container logistics project with the Port of Rotterdam, a Korean customs blockchain, and project for authenticating customers of Korean banks.
