The use cases of blockchain technology have expanded in recent years. Today, the tech is witnessing a massive rise in adoption across major sectors, including the crypto sphere. As the underlying technology of numerous crypto projects, blockchain helps to provide transparency, security, and decentralization. These summarize the basic functions of a blockchain. However, to achieve these functions, it is very important that a blockchain network is highly scalable. This thus leads us to the concept of scalability.
What is Blockchain Scalability?
Co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin identified scalability as one of the three trilemmas of a blockchain. He highlighted the other two as security and decentralization. As for scalability, it deals with the ability of a blockchain network to process a certain load of transactions at a given period of time. This thus means the concept of scalability has to do with the transaction processing speed of a blockchain. Certainly, we can affirm that a blockchain is highly scalable if it possesses the capacity to process huge transactions very fast.
For a blockchain to be regarded as scalable, it must pass three stages. They include execution, storage and consensus. Execution deals with the amount of computation required to execute transactions in a network. Here, transactions processed in a blockchain are fully verified. It is worth mentioning that the higher the transactions, the higher the computation requiring execution.
Meanwhile, Storage can be subcategorized into historical data and global state. Historical data entails the raw data in a blockchain network. These data include the source of the transaction, destination, amount of the asset transferred, signature attached to each transaction, and many more. As for Global state, it comprises the snapshot of the readable data which helps to validate upcoming transactions. This storage is regarded as the database of a blockchain.
Lastly, for a blockchain to be scalable, nodes running on it must agree to achieve finality. This is what consensus entails. Beyond aiding the scalability of a network, consensus also fosters its security and decentralization.
Addressing Scalability with Web3
Scalability is one of the deficiencies that surfaced from the trilemma of blockchain. The trilemma is Security, Decentralization, and Scalability, these three have been battling the blockchain for ages. To some extent, many regard them as one of the major factors that have hindered the global adoption of blockchain. Issues about scalability surfaced as existing networks attempted to address the trilemma of blockchain. Though addressing the blockchain trilemma isn’t totally out of reach. However, it has been difficult for the present networks to effectively address the three.
Similarly, present layer-1 networks have been able to offer solutions to at least solve two of the trilemma of blockchain. Most of these networks championed security and decentralization leaving out scalability. Only a few layer-1 blockchains prioritized scalability. Ripple belongs to this category of blockchain, the network sacrificed decentralization to champion security and stability.
However, the introduction of various layer-2 solutions has provided a preamble to how scalability issues on the blockchain can be finally laid to rest. Likewise, the invention of roll-ups has as well helped in addressing these issues. This is in addition to the numerous efforts that are channeled at addressing scalability issues on the blockchain. Nevertheless, they’ve not been able to address the issue fully as they as well have their deficiency.
With that, there are strong assurances that combining these efforts with Web3 will further address these issues to a noticeable extent, if not totally. Web3 scaling solutions will surely push these efforts up. Against all doubts, it will continue to play a significant role in solving these scalability jams. With the growing advancement of web3, in the coming months, we should expect more solutions that are aimed at arresting blockchain scalability issues.
Conclusion
The dynamism of web3 will prove pivotal in addressing blockchain scalability. This is due to the rapid embracement of innovation and the continuous efforts to improve it. Due to that, the advancement of web3 will birth more rollups, sidechains, validiums, and plasma chains. Consequently, the introduction of these solutions will come with various advanced versions that’ll enhance them in effectively curbing scalability issues. Indeed, without a doubt, web3 is at the forefront of the crusade of solving blockchain scalability.