How Do You Scale a Blockchain?

Blockchain technology has emerged as a game-changing innovation, transforming multiple industries and the way people transact and exchange data. With blockchain, users can send money and assets anywhere in the world with no intermediaries, and so much more. But blockchains aren’t known for their scalability.

Bitcoin blocks can only store ~2MB of data per block, which are mined roughly every 10 minutes, creating an average throughput of 7 transactions per second. What does this mean in practice? Waiting ten minutes at a coffee shop for your BTC payment to go through before you can leave for work with a bagel and latte. As you can imagine, that’s a problem if you want to onboard the mainstream. And we are getting closer to that every day.

Bitcoin has nearly 1M daily active addresses. The space is growing quickly, and to meet growing demand, we have to turn to blockchain scalability solutions in order to provide cost-efficient and timely transactions. Without both, the user experience is simply too poor for widespread adoption to succeed.

So how do you scale a blockchain? Read our latest blog posts on scalability to learn everything you need to know.

Your Scalability Curriculum:

AN INTRODUCTION TO BLOCKCHAIN SCALABILITY

Learn the basics of scalability, from new protocol designs and sharding to layers 2s and rollups. Start reading.

WHAT ARE BLOCKCHAIN LAYERS?

How does layering work in Web2 and what benefits does a layered stack have in Web3? Start reading.

BITCOIN LAYER 2s: THE FUTURE OF THE BITCOIN ECOSYSTEM

Discover how a layered tech stack specifically solves Bitcoin’s design limitations. Start reading.