A really good summary of the design considerations for performance that have driven the development of the Cardano blockchain by John Woods, the IOHK Director of Cardano Architecture.
All blockchains face a choice between decentralisation, speed, and security; the so called blockchain trilemma. He notes:
From its conception, Cardano has been architected as a platform to best balance the perennial trade-offs of security, scalability and decentralization. Therefore we have architected and built a solid and secure network layer, yet with the flexibility to grow and scale to support a global base of millions of users.
With a secure, highly decentralized proof of stake network now firmly established, and core smart contract capability deployed, we’re now heading into the Basho phase, focused on optimization, scaling and network growth.
https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/11/22/slow-and-steady-wins-the-race-network-evolution-for-network-growth/
It provides a really good explanation of the rationale behind the 12.5% increase to block size which will be coming in December.
There are now well over 2 million Cardano wallets in use and traffic has grown by over 20 times in a year (from less than 10,000 transactions per day in November 2020 to over 200,000 transactions per day. Because of the anticipated rise in traffic as developers roll out new DApps, the block size is quickly becoming a key consideration. Larger block sizes mean that more transactions can fit into a block, thus providing greater capacity for users. Being able to fit 12.5% more transactions into a block is significant, as it means that we’re processing more transactions per second or we argue – a more useful metric – greater data throughput.
Worth reading in full. Really good to see John increasing his contribution to communicating the Cardano design choices made and ahead. He will be joining the Cardano360 again this month, we’ll post the link as usual.