As work continues on Novi, Facebook’s digital wallet that the company hopes one day will be used to access currencies in the Libra blockchain-based payment system, models of a blockchain-based payment system have emerged. 20: 2nd ACM Conference on Advances in FinTech. A paper co-authored by scientists at Facebook’s Novi division suggests a transaction processing system called FastPay, which they claim can be used to process cryptocurrency payments or as an infrastructure to support bulk payments in fiat currency. In tests, the team managed to achieve “incontinent” confirmations under 100 milliseconds and over 80,000 transactions per second with 20 different payment authorizations.

While blockchain technology shows promise for enabling applications like personal wallets and private transactions, its open, distributed nature has come at the expense of high performance and questionable scalability. The challenge was a 2017 paper that discussed the use of distributed ledgers in payment, clearing and settlement infrastructures. The Bank for International Settlements cited “final settlement ambiguities” as one of the main obstacles to blockchain adoption.

FastPay aims to solve this problem by allowing authorities to share account balances and process prepaid bulk payments between accounts. The researchers claim that it supports “less than 1 second” confirmation latency, which is suitable for physical payments at the point of sale, while also offering a capacity comparable to the highest card network volume and real-time total payments. “FastPay eliminates the counterparty and credit risks of net settlement and eliminates the need for intermediary banks and the complicated financial contracts between them to absorb those risks,” the authors write. “FastPay can take on any capacity with each delegate through efficient analysis architectures.”

The researchers say that building the FastPay demo on Amazon Web Services took about 2.5 months of work by 3 engineers, with a server with 96 virtual processors on a 48-core Intel Xeon Platinum 8175 and 384 GB of memory. In tests, they claim that FastPay supports up to 160,000 transactions per second under a combined load of 1.5 million transactions across 48 cores, about 7 times the maximum transaction speed of the Visa payment network, while running on computers less than 4,000 US Dollars a month run costs. And in a latency test, the co-authors say that FastPay does well on both transfers and confirmations with delays of less than 200 milliseconds for a customer on the US West Coast and around 50 milliseconds for a customer in the UK.

The researchers confirm that their tests show the best performance, and a Facebook spokesperson said FastPay is a rigorous test protocol study. However, for the sake of transparency, they have provided the open source code for the implementation of the FastPay system, the supporting script and the measurement data.

The researchers said:

“FastPay can be used as a sub-chain of any cryptocurrency with guaranteed logic and full programmability. FastPay’s performance and robustness far surpass even the most modern and confirms that the elimination of both centralized and fully consensus-based solutions for managing pre-funded retail payments offers a significant advantage. “

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According to Venturebeat

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