Last night a group representing 40 banks, accounting firms and members of the media gathered for the public launch of Domus Tower, a whispered-about startup rumored to be developing a blockchain capable of facilitating more than one million transactions per second.
At the event on the seventh floor of Museum Tower in Midtown Manhattan, the company’s chief technical officer demonstrated an early version of the blockchain, though one admittedly not running at anywhere near its theoretic top speed.
But beyond the geeky tech demos, the startup with an unusual history, and new approach, announced it was in the early phases of launching a new trust-based blockchain consortium. The group would be dedicated to settling equities in the United States and eventually comprised of five companies each representing a different sector.
The company’s CEO Joe Forster said: “By having an immutable recording device and public-private keys, you can develop the trust to straight-through process.” Focus on settlement
The blockchain itself, designed to render irrelevant a very specific division of the DTCC that provides clearing and settlement services, isn’t composed of any revolutionary cryptographic tools, but rather public-private key functionality combined with hashing, much like the bitcoin blockchain.
By trimming fat elsewhere in the code, the company’s CTO, Rhett Creighton, said he’s able to transact blocks of 10,000 transactions each at a rate as high as more than one million transactions per second.
To be precise, the Domus blockchain — as the company calls it — has reached a top speed of 1.24 million transactions per second, according to numbers also released last night in a white paper describing the technology’s makeup and performance. The maximum transaction size in the test was 256 bytes, counting the size of signature itself.
The most heated part of the evening was when Creighton, a graduate of MIT, turned over questions […]
