BlockSTM
As an offshoot of Diem, which was building a blockchain capable of onboarding Meta’s user base of nearly 3 billion, BlockSTM touts scalability as its biggest weapon. Aptos and Sui claim to be able to reach 160,000 TPS and 120,000 TPS (on an 8-core M1 MacBook Pro; 25,000 TPS on a single core), respectively, which seems a bit unrealistic given that Ethereum, Avitrum, and VISA have processing speeds of 15, 500, and 65,000 TPS, respectively. What’s the secret to these speeds?
The key lies in the BlockSTM technology that the project executives were working on when they were at Meta. BlockSTM is a smart contract parallel execution engine that utilizes Software Transactional Memory (a technique that applies the properties of database transactions that satisfy the ACID property to parallel programming). Unlike traditional blockchains that require transactions to be processed sequentially according to block order, BlockSTM has the following features.
Independent transactions can be divided into multiple threads and executed simultaneously and in parallel (note: parallel processing is also possible with Sealevel).
Pre-determine the order of transactions (Pre-defined order)
Transactions are executed first and validation and consensus processes are performed later, eliminating bottlenecks in the blockchain and dramatically increasing speed.
Therefore, it is said that the maximum TPS of a blockchain when BlockSTM is applied is 160k, and it is usually 60k. However, it is important to note that the TPS can be significantly lower than this if there is a conflict in the verification process of a transaction and it needs to be rolled back, or if the commit operation is interrupted for some reason, so investors should be aware of this. In fact, the above concept has been used in the field of computer science for a long time, so it is difficult to consider it as a revolutionary technology, but I think it is very significant that the existing method is reorganized to be applied to the blockchain and additional safeguards are provided.