Australian Record Scalability Blockchain: How Crypto Is Stepping Into the Land Down Under

On Sept. 26, Australia's National Science Agency, an independent Australian federal government agency responsible for scientific research, developed a blockchain network called Red Belly with the University of Sydney.

In an actual mainnet setting, these machines replaced with nodes, thus the Red Belly Blockchain would work structurally similarly to Bitcoin, Ethereum and other public blockchain networks.

The development team of Red Belly Blockchain established several key missions of the project to ensure that the basis of the initiative is not to replicate a blockchain network for the sake of experimenting with an emerging and disruptive technology.

"Red Belly Blockchain is solving the issues that have plagued previous generations of blockchain systems including environmental impact from significant energy use, double spending where an individual spends their money twice by initiating more than one transaction, and throughput, which refers to how many units of information can be processed in a short amount of time."

The developers did not release technical intricacies of its algorithm, but based on claims around Bitcoin's usage of electricity, it is highly likely that the project employed either proof-of-stake or delegated proof-of-stake consensus algorithms as a replacement to PoW. In the Red Belly Blockchain press release Vincent Gramoli, senior researcher at CSIRO's Data61 and head of Concurrent Systems Research Group at the University of Sydney, emphasized that he believes the next generation blockchain will feature consensus algorithms that do not require mining infrastructure and energy consumption, which limits the ability of blockchains to process information and increase costs involved in producing blocks of data.

"Real-world applications of blockchain have been struggling to get off the ground due to issues with energy consumption and complexities induced by the proof of work. The deployment of Red Belly Blockchain on AWS shows the unique scalability and strength of the next generation ledger technology in a global context."

The shift in focus from PoW to PoS by major public blockchain networks and government agencies demonstrates a newly emerging trend in the global cryptocurrency community, which is to experiment with blockchain networks that are highly efficient and consume a limited amount of energy.

The presence of such platforms - and increasing progress in the blockchain sector to commercialize and scale the technology - could lead to an influx of blockchain projects in the months to come.

On April 11, 2018, the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, announced the implementation of new regulations for crypto-related businesses to improve its local crypto and blockchain sector.

With active blockchain development initiated by government-funded agencies and a growing cryptocurrency exchange market, Australia could see rapid improvement in the country's crypto and blockchain space in the years to come.