Inside the blockchain developer's mind: The vertical scaling crisis

Many people recognize the potential for blockchain technology to disrupt these private monopolies and oligopolies, but unfortunately, no specific blockchain has been able to reach beyond the walls of the existing blockchain and cryptocurrency community.

Blockchain nodes are the "Factory," and what determines their output is how efficiently they use the components in a computer.

Speaking from direct experience, blockchains are horribly unoptimized with respect to node resource management, which makes them the perfect candidate for vertical scaling solutions.

Because blockchains in the BitShares line are capable of performing so many more transactions per second, this actually increases the importance of vertical scaling - because their blockchain state is growing so much faster.

The problem with blockchains from the BitShares line is that they achieve their performance through a design that never actually reflects the current state of the blockchain.

Many blockchain projects are using RocksDB in various ways, but the problem with the database design we have outlined is that the constant need to undo pending transactions and rewrite to the database negates the benefits of RocksDB. Facebook's news feed is all about database reads.

Existing blockchains are reaching the performance limits of what they can get out of a single node as a consequence of how they resolve forks and how they store their blockchain state.

Our goal is not to explain in detail how one can solve the vertical scaling problem but to give some insight into the nature of what we think is a dramatically underappreciated problem in the blockchain space.

Rew Levine is the CEO of OpenOrchard, where he and the former development team behind the Steem blockchain build blockchain-based solutions that empower people to take ownership and control over their digital selves.

Their foundational product is Koinos, a high-performance blockchain built on an entirely new framework architected to give developers the features they need in order to deliver the user experiences necessary to spread blockchain adoption to the masses.