An Ultra-Scalable Blockchain Platform for Universal Asset Tokenization:
Design and Implementation
Abstract
Since its introduction with Bitcoin in 2009, blockchain technology has
received tremendous attention by academia, industry, politics and media
alike, in particular, through extended blockchain-based visions such as
smart contracts, decentralized finance, and, most recently, Web3. The
critical prerequisite for any such blockchain-based vision to be turned
into reality is uncapped scalability. Furthermore, and equally
important, blockchain technology needs to transcend the stage of
specialized tokens into an adaptive, heterogeneous tokenization
platform. In this paper, we explain the Alphabill family of technologies
that addresses both unlimited scalability and unrestricted adaptivity.
We deliver a sharded blockchain technology with unlimited scalability
and performance, called KSI Cash, which is based on a new form of
electronic money scheme, the bill scheme. We present performance tests
of KSI Cash that we have conducted with the European Central Bank and a
group of eight national central banks from the Eurosystem in order to
assess the technological feasibility of a digital euro, showing the
system operating with 100 million wallets and 15 thousand transactions
per second (under simulation of realistic usage), having an estimated
carbon footprint of 0.0001g CO2 per transaction (Bitcoin = 100 kg and
more); furthermore, showing the system operating with up to 2 million
payment orders per second, an equivalent of more than 300.000
transactions per second (in a laboratory setting with the central
components of KSI Cash), scaling linearly in terms of the number of
deployed shards. We explain, in detail, the key concepts that unlock
this performance (i.e., the concepts of the bill money scheme). The
results provide evidence that the scalability of our technology is
unlimited in both permissioned and permissionless scenarios, resulting
into the Alphabill Money technology. Next, we contribute the
architecture of a universal tokenization platform that allows for
universal asset tokenization, transfer and exchange as a global medium
of exchange, called Alphabill platform. We reveal the crucial
conceptual and technical contributions of the platform’s architecture
and their interplay, including the data structures of KSI Cash and
Alphabill Money, the dust collection solution of Alphabill Money, and
the atomic swap solution of the Alphabill platform.