Can Stellar Lumens scale to 1,000,000 tps?

• Stellar blockchain employs “transaction broadcasting” which leads to excessive transfer of redundant info among nodes.
• Pull Mode helps to reduce this redundancy using hash which reduces computational power for validating a transaction and leads to greater transaction throughput.

Layer-1 blockchain network Stellar has been popular within the blockchain community as optimal for payments due to its competitive TPS rate. Transactions per second (TPS) is often a key metric to rank different blockchain networks and represents the blockchain’s usability for real-life cases.

The Stellar network’s maximum TPS rate is currently 200 TPS. In one of its recent core release and protocol updates dubbed Pull Mode, developers seek to improve the Stellar Network’s total transactions per second (TPS).

But before we proceed to understand what’s Pull Mode, let’s take a look into the transaction propagation taking place on the Stellar blockchain.

As per the Stellar Consensus Protocol, network validators need to keep a complete historical record of every transaction occurring on the Stellar blockchain. To validate a transaction and close the ledger, all validators must also reach an agreement.

For this, validators need to communicate with their peers about the transactions. Validators on the Stellar blockchain use something called “transaction broadcasting”. Here each node broadcasts data about transactions to other nodes within the network. Thus, there’s no one node that can act as a central disseminator of information. This highlights that each node within the Stellar blockchain has equal power and the network is completely decentralized.

However, one downside to this is there’s the dissemination of an excessive amount of redundant information between nodes. With so many nodes telling each other about transactions, a single node might be told about a transaction more than 30 times.

This level of redundancy is unnecessary since it requires an excessive amount of CPU, memory, and bandwidth to function. It would ultimately slow down the network speed.

Stellar Pull Mode helps reduce redundancy

With the Pull Mode, Stellar developers have implemented the concept of “ask before you send”. Although this is quite a basic concept in human interaction, it is not so common or obvious to validators on the decentralized network.

However, with the implementation of the Pull Node, validators started sending each other a representation of the transaction to confirm whether any validator already knows about it before sending the transaction itself.

Each transaction representation thus happens through a hash. It is nothing but a shortened notation of a transaction that takes less computing power to transmit and read. Thus, the sending of the transaction happens only if the receiving node doesn’t have any previous record of it and only if accepts the request.

The developers tested the Pull Mode in a Stellar Supercluster. The announcement notes:

Pull Mode was tested three ways: in a version of Stellar Supercuster meant to behave like a realistic network, in a version of Stellar Supercluster with other potential configurations, and a version that permitted limit testing, flooding the network with transactions until it breaks to determine an absolute maximum TPS.

The results obtained through Stellar Superclusters showed that the Pull Mode increased the maximum TPS by 72 percent. It was mainly due to the Pull Mode’s ability to reduce computational power for validating a transaction.

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