Prism: Scaling Bitcoin by 10,000x

09/25/2019

∙

by   Lei Yang, et al.

∙

0

∙

share

Bitcoin is the first fully decentralized permissionless blockchain protocol and achieves a high level of security: the ledger it maintains has guaranteed liveness and consistency properties as long as the adversary has less compute power than the honest nodes. However, its throughput is only 7 transactions per second and the confirmation latency can be up to hours. Prism is a new blockchain protocol which is designed to achieve a natural scaling of Bitcoin's performance while maintaining its full security guarantees. We present an implementation of Prism which achieves a throughput of 70,000 transactions per second and confirmation latencies of tens of seconds.