Key Takeaways
- Founder and CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried has said blockchains need to scale to millions of TPS.
- He notes that even Solana’s 50,000 TPS is laughable for the global adoption of crypto.
- The year has been a success for crypto regardless, according to the CEO.
The crypto industry still has a lot to achieve before it can finally claim to have arrived, according to the founder and CEO of cryptocurrency derivatives exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried aka SBF. One of these is improved scalability.
In a long thread on Twitter, the crypto billionaire noted that at the moment Solana held the record for the fastest transaction per the second throughput at around 50,000 TPS. But even this is not enough if the crypto industry is going to be adopted at a global scale as this would require networks that handle millions of transactions per second.
“Well, blockchains are starting to scale, but it’s not enough yet. We’re at ~50k TPS; industrial-scale applications often require millions.” He noted, “I always laugh when a blockchain says they’re already fast. None are! Fast means millions of TPS. No one is there yet.”
Why scalability is mission-critical for crypto
SBF noted the fact that 2021 has been the most explosive year for the crypto industry. He acknowledged the biggest achievements of the industry to have been a strong user base, more blockchains with smart contracts capabilities, new potential use cases, the introduction of scaling solutions, and the massive attention that the industry got. But these would be wasted if scalability is not given serious consideration.
According to SBF, the crypto industry has shown that the winners in the space are those with strong network effects – those that are supported by a large number of buyers and sellers. This is why the industry needs to work towards being scalable as achieving scalability would allow crypto to not only make payments and remittances feasible on the blockchain, but also allow for new use cases such as social media, information flow, and video gaming integrated with NFTs.
This is why it matters that the crypto industry has a “concrete roadmap to scale to millions of TPS” and execute well on it.
What else matters for crypto in 2022?
While achieving scalability is one side of the coin for the future of crypto, it is not the only pressing need of the industry according to SBF. The young billionaire also thinks that the crypto industry seriously needs regulations. He noted that the industry needs to work collaboratively to address the current regulatory gaps while also allowing for liquidity to move to the US and Europe.
Additionally, he points out that the crypto industry also needs to work on security as well as improve users’ experience to keep staying relevant.
