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Avalanche’s HyperSDK blockchain upgrade hits 143K TPS on testnet

September 11, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Avalanche

Ava Labs is testing a high-throughput framework that will enable developers to build their own virtual machines.

Smart contract layer-1 blockchain network Avalanche's testnet has reportedly hit over 140,000 transactions per second during testing of its HyperSDK blockchain upgrade.

Avalanche is currently testing a framework for building high-performance Virtual Machines (VMs) from scratch on the network.

According to Ava Labs, HyperSDK is structured so that developers can “plug into a lightning-fast execution environment without writing massive amounts of code from scratch.”

This enables the simplification and acceleration of custom VM development, making it easier for developers to launch optimized blockchains.

HyperSDK reached a whopping 143,322 transactions per second in a controlled testing environment, according to a screenshot shared on GitHub.

In comparison, Avalanche claims to currently process up to 4,500 TPS, Solana claims between 2,000 and 3,000 TPS, and Ethereum does just 15-20, according to data from Coincodex.

#Avalanche HyperSDK, 143k TPS!!! https://t.co/LPBs9zO0Nk pic.twitter.com/m66EisQ9Ux
— JonB (@Jonbros01) September 2, 2023

Speaking to Cointelegraph’s Andrew Fenton at the Korea Blockchain Week 2023, the head of product at Ava Labs, Nick Mussallem, said he expects real-world throughput to eventually settle around 50,000 TPS.

“They've clocked at it at 141,000. But that's in a very controlled environment. So I think if you were to cut that in half, it would still be very generous and probably will do more than that.”

Referring to the blockchain trilemma, which is the delicate balance between decentralization, scalability, and security, he said nothing was sacrificed, adding that the Avalanche developers wrote it from scratch to better handle state management:

“Basically took out a lot of the stuff that was in the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) that they felt was unnecessary on the networking layer, or at the storage layer, and then put our consensus algorithm underneath it. And it just goes fast. Now it's optimized.”

Blockchains built with HyperSDK will operate as subnets called HyperChains and can be adapted for any function the developer wishes.

There will be a user interface (GUI) that doesn’t require additional coding and developers will also have a choice of VM. “You can literally launch it in five minutes,” said Mussallem.

Mussallem said HyperSDK was open source and available right now, “but it's very much in the early beta stages.”

It hasn't been launched and is not production ready yet as the target for that is by the end of the year, he added.

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More TPS, less gas: Ethereum layer 2 Starknet outlines performance upgrades

May 1, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Starknet makes performance improvements top priority in 2023, aiming to increase throughput, lower latency and reduce transaction costs.

Layer-2 blockchain protocols have been in the spotlight in 2023, bringing major performance improvements to a variety of platforms and services operating in the Ethereum (ETH) ecosystem.

Zero-knowledge proofs have been key in the roll-out of a variety of layer 2s, with the technology pioneered by the decentralized scaling network Starknet. StarkWare, the technology firm behind the scaling platform, has outlined plans to further improve its layer-2 network to meet an expected increase in users and developers through the rest of the year.

Cointelegraph caught up with Eli Ben-Sasson, president and co-founder of StarkWare, to unpack key points set out in a 2023 roadmap for Starknet. Chief among a list of to-dos is performance improvements that are centered around higher throughput and reduced latency of Starknet’s network.

Ben-Sasson highlighted the focus on performance upgrades that are expected to deliver significantly higher transactions per second (TPS) than on Ethereum’s mainnet at lower gas costs:

“The most important thing is for builders and developers to have high throughput so that they can really build. Starknet is about increasing the computational abilities of Ethereum and we just want to provide this raw power to the hands of developers.”

Starknet v0.12.0 is expected to be released in the next month and is the culmination of a six-month sprint that involves transitioning Starknet’s development stack to a Rust-based Sequencer as well as an open-source project that has built a Rust-Cairo VM (virtual-machine).

StarkWare open-sourced its programming language compiler Cairo early in 2023, with the language aimed at driving the development of zk-rollup and validity proof-powered decentralized applications (DApps).

Ben-Sasson added that Starknet continues to chase an ambitious target of processing at least 10 times the throughput of Ethereum at a tenth of the cost. He highlighted StarkEx’s ability to deliver significant TPS on decentralized exchange dYdX. StarkEx is another layer-2 scaling engine developed by StarkWare.

At times, dYdX processes up to 54 transactions per second, while the average TPS of Ethereum is around 10 to 12. Ben-Sasson also noted that these dYdX transactions are roughly four to five times larger than those on Ethereum, which bodes well for the improved scaling capabilities of Starknet in the near future:

“We're often experiencing practical TPS or gas usage that is orders of magnitude greater than what Ethereum can deal with. I'm very confident that this will also be replicated on Starknet.”

Performance improvements have been prioritized as a result of developer and user feedback highlighting delays in transaction processing on Starknet. The next port of call is the reduction of transaction costs which will be addressed by targeting the cost of storing data on Ethereum’s mainnet.

“We're going to roll out Volition, which allows users to opt as to whether they want their data on or off-chain and this will be part of the base layer of the Starknet system.”

Ben-Sasson said the release of off-chain data availability will complement Ethereum’s in-development improvement proposal ‘Proto-Danksharding’ EIP-4844, which will introduce a new type of transaction that carries binary large objects or ‘blobs’. The EIP fundamentally aims to provide cheaper transactions.

Starknet is also aiming to deliver faster finality further down the 2023 roadmap, which will produce shorter and fixed interval block times on the network. This will be carried out with the introduction of a fee market to prioritize Starknet’s network resources on users’ willingness to pay for transactions, inspired by conventional market systems:

“Market mechanisms are a very good way to solve this. Blockchain didn't invent this, blockchains adopted this from just the conventional world. That's how you prioritize resources and allow users to signal this.”

A number of Ethereum layer-2 protocols have begun rolling out zk-rollups to further improve efforts to provide faster and cheaper transactions to the smart contract blockchain network. This includes the likes of Polygon and ConsenSys.

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Throughput