Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, Scaling the Blockchain Network
According to MarketWatch, the blockchain market was valued at $358 million in 2017 and is projected to reach between $31 billion and $40 billion by 2025. This relatively new technology, which surfaced prior to 2010, enables parties to engage in secure sharing of information that is highly secure, transparent, and more resistant to corruption.
A critical issue in the scaling of blockchain, however, has been its ability to handle digital bottlenecks amid rising user traffic.
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, PhD, professor of computer science and head of Northwestern Networks Group, has helped to significantly streamline and speed up the management of blockchain transactions, making them considerably more potentially lucrative for users.
Kuzmanovic co-founded a company called bloXroute, along with then-doctoral student (and current CEO) Uri Klarman, PhD ’19, based on Klarman’s PhD thesis, “Unchaining the Blockchain Network Layer,” that’s focused on blockchain system performance as a computer networking problem.
Together, they created the Blockchain Distribution Network, which leverages several advanced networking techniques. These have enabled bloXroute to be able to drastically increase the transaction-per-second rate within blockchain—without sacrificing security or decentralization—which has gone a long way toward tackling the scaling-up challenge.
“The performance of blockchain systems is measured in the number of transactions that a system can process within a period of time,” Kuzmanovic said. “For bitcoin and other blockchain systems, this value is typically very low, like three per second. Our system provides a networking infrastructure that helps data move much faster on the Internet, making the number skyrocket into the thousands of transactions per second.”
Their approach applies to all blockchain systems, not just those used by currency traders. Launched in 2017, bloXroute has raised more than $10 million from major venture capital firms. Pilot collaborations with top blockchains like Etherium and Bitcoin Cash led to the ultimate rollout of bloXroute’s BDN Version 1 in December 2019.
While bitcoin and other currency exchanges are the best-known use case for blockchain, bloXroute is growing their market share in other markets, including:
- data and secure identity management;
- “smart contracts” that execute automatically once certain conditions are met; and,
- “micro-transaction” capability to manage small financial transactions on digital platforms.
“The idea behind blockchain is to enable large-scale transactions at a very small fee,” Kuzmanovic said. “For this fee to be very small, you have to have a large capacity. In order to attract mainstream businesses, you need a large scale. This is our mission.”