University of Sydney researchers are building a new super-fast, safe blockchain technology that has the potential to revolutionize the global economy. Best known as the technology that underpins Bitcoin and other virtual currencies, blockchain is a digital public ledger where transactions are recorded and confirmed pseudonymously. Named the ‘Red Belly Blockchain’, the new system being developed by the University of Sydney’s School of Information Technologies will allow secure and almost instantaneous digital transfer of virtual currencies across the world.“ In recent testing, our blockchain achieved the best performance we have seen so far – with more than 440,000 transactions per second on 100 machines,” said University of Sydney academic Dr Vincent Gramoli, who heads up the Concurrent Systems Research Group developing the technology.“ In comparison, VISA’s network has a peak capacity of around 56,000 transactions per second and the Bitcoin network is limited to around seven transactions per second.”
US universities have been quicker to join the bandwagon. Stanford University launched a bitcoin and cryptocurrencies course two years ago. A similar course is offered by the University of California, Berkeley, and another is in the works at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There are also scores of internet tutorials, many of them available for free as massive open online courses. Coursera, an education-focused tech company, has joined with Princeton University to offer an 11-week cryptocurrency technologies course. A group of experienced cryptocurrency executives founded the Blockchain University three years ago in California, offering an eight-week course to students who paid a $100 deposit that is refundable on completing the course. At the other end of the spectrum is B9lab, a fee-charging institution based in London and Hamburg offering a 40-hour course in blockchain for technical executives and analysts that is spread over nine weeks and costs €2,350. Underlining how swiftly the technology is becoming mainstream, data requested by the FT from LinkedIn, the career-related social networking platform, showed there over 1,000 blockchain-related job adverts on the site in early June, more than treble the level of a year ago.
Research labs focusing on blockchain technology are being opened up at the University of Edinburgh and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, sponsored by one of the cofounders of cryptocurrency Ethereum. IOHK, a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency research and development company, is investing up to $1 million in the two facilities, according to the business’ cofounder Charles Hoskinson. Hoskinson was one of the founders of Ethereum, a popular digital currency set up in 2013.