Asensys, a high-performance distributed ledger blockchain platform startup, today emerged from stealth mode to launch its new website and announce new technology to deliver greater scalability to blockchain networks.

Blockchain technology is the same infrastructure that makes globally traded cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and Ethereum function. Bitcoin now has an approximate market cap of $170 billion and Ethereum $19 billion.

However, in terms of scalability, bitcoin can handle only 3.3 to seven transactions per second and Ethereum about 15 transactions per second. That means network congestion can seriously impact processing times. In comparison, credit card networks such as Visa Inc. handle on average about 2,000 transactions per second, although Visa’s scalability claims are much higher.

Asensys founder Brendon Wang started the company after researching methods to provide better scalability to blockchain networks. It was thought that scaling blockchains would require sacrificing either decentralization or security to achieve high-performance at large scale.

“What we discovered through comprehensive research and analysis is that the limitations of scalability in blockchain networks are not based on the type of consensus algorithm deployed, as many would believe, but on the fact that every single node must duplicate the entire network each time a new block is added,” Wang said.

A consensus algorithm is the method by which a blockchain network comes to an agreement among its many distributed nodes that a transaction can be added to the network. Using consensus and wide distribution, blockchain networks make it extremely difficult to duplicate transactions during transmission or forge transactions after they are recorded. That’s fundamental to the security of these networks.

“This built-in over-redundancy is what prohibits blockchains like bitcoin and Ethereum from improving performance and reaching the throughput required to meet the demands of the modern digital economy,” Wang added.

In order to help ease that throughput issue, the Asensys blockchain platform will introduce the concept of “consensus zones” capable of parallel transaction processing and distributed workload execution. Using this model, Wang believes, his network could enable up to 100,000 transactions per second and sustain a user base of more than a billion.

According to Wang, this new model will allow Asensys to eschew needless repetition of ledger transactions that slows down current legacy blockchain platforms and thus dramatically increase network performance.

Those statistics have been culled from in-house testing done by the startup and experiments that showed that the Asensys protocol scales proportionally with community size. The startup claims a test including 1,200 virtual machines worldwide to support 48,000 nodes revealed the network could deliver 1,000 times the throughput and 2,000 the capacity of the bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains.

Claims of high-performance, high-scalability blockchains have been made before, but little movement has been made across the industry. Asensys will be competing with startups such as the Dexon Foundation, which raised $20 million in 2018; Kadena LLC, an enterprise-ready hybrid blockchain platform with high-scalability; and Skale Network, which claims a multichain blockchain that can run 2,000 transactions per second per chain.

Even with those companies exploring and experimenting with high-scalability blockchains, no new breakaway best blockchain protocol has emerged to supplant the current legacy networks.

Using its new consensus protocol and consensus zones in parallel processing, Asensys hopes, its blockchain can provide high throughput with the same security of other blockchain networks. The platform also includes features such as recurrent payment model — allowing subscription payments — programmable signing and customization of transaction validation, an on-chain random number generator, on-chain persistent storage, on-chain namespace such as internet Domain Name Servers provide, and support for decentralized applications.

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