10-02-2025 
|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The wait for Teranode is over. The BSV blockchain’s long-term project to turbo-charge blockchain’s capabilities is now ready to use and explore, at least, on the testnet. But with the source code now publicly available, everyone is free to take a look and start building. The biggest question, and one even Teranode’s developers can’t answer yet, is: What will the world do with this new data-processing superpower?
- A new era of scale begins
- The minds behind Teranode
- Scaling Bitcoin, rewritten
- The real test starts now
Teranode is the most advanced node client for the Bitcoin protocol which can process a million transactions per second (TPS). As it develops further, it’ll be billions or even trillions per second. A million is a great start. It’s not hyperbole to say blockchain is about to enter a new dimension, one that wipes away years of noise over whether blockchain could do this or that, or what workarounds would be required. BSV scales unboundedly, on-chain, and from now on, the answer is always yes.
Sure, we could list all the current tech buzzwords like high-frequency trading, stablecoins and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), game tournaments, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), social media, rich multimedia, bottleneck-free dApps for enterprise and governments, data ownership, integrity, and security for all. But the truth is, Teranode lays the foundation for a truly global digital economy where everyone can participate. As in all healthy economies, it’s up to every participant to discover how to make the most of it.
Here’s the source code and the documentation. Get reading! For now, this is privileged, almost exclusive information that few in the world truly appreciate yet. Here’s an opportunity to be a pioneer.
Blockchain’s new universe, from the people who built it
OK, that’s enough hype, but this is exciting stuff. Connor Murray and a group of others who contributed to Teranode’s release got together to share the details, namely, BSV Association‘s (BSVA) Director of Teranode Siggi Óskarsson, BSVA Tech Lead Oli Óskarsson, Dylan Murray, and Darren Kellenschwiler.
“We’ve been experiencing this every day, so it’s interesting to put this into other people’s hands & see what they do with it,” Siggi says. Dylan Murray calls it “some of the most fun I’ve had in the blockchain space in a while.”
While other blockchains calling themselves “Bitcoin” stay mired in endless debates over how much (or how little) data should be allowed into a transaction, BSV with Teranode is rocketing a mile over their heads. It’s three to four TPS versus Teranode’s million, Connor notes.
Kellenschwiler says Teranode’s subtree validation service might be one key difference an outsider might notice between Teranode and the linear transaction processing of other blockchains (including BSV on SV Node). Subtrees are a key factor in ensuring the blockchain network can scale horizontally and thus unboundedly. It allows BSV to validate huge batches of transactions in parallel, in real time.
Connor says his three key differences are subtrees, extended transaction formats, and changes to how BSV’s peer-to-peer network works—the latter being the change that stands out most. It’s not an entirely new protocol (it’s based on libp2p), but it does work differently. Teranode’s P2P protocol doesn’t send all transaction data in messages, making it more efficient.
Siggi says it’s important to stress that Teranode is not changing the Bitcoin protocol—all the rules for processing transactions and blocks from Satoshi Nakamoto’s original release of Bitcoin in 2009 still apply.
“I want to reiterate that. The only thing we’re doing is taking the block, a normal full block, and we’re just abstracting it away into parts. With all those parts, you can reassemble the block, but with it split into parts, you can communicate those parts separately between miners. But essentially, it’s just a normal block.”Teranode release: how soon is now?
The Teranode project to reach Bitcoin’s true scaling potential began in 2019-20 by another engineering team. The version being released now comes from a complete rewrite of the project under the same name, using the Go language, led by Siggi since 2023.
It’s probably the longest-awaited project in BSV and has often epitomized the wry “soon” meme that answers every “when will it be released?” question in scalable blockchain. However, now that it’s ready, it also proves “soon” does in fact have an end date and there are rewards for the patient.
Both Siggi and Oli Óskarsson acknowledge it has been a long and often arduous journey to finally bring Teranode into the real world.
“The hard part about scaling something like the Bitcoin protocol with Teranode was, it’s a systems problem,” Siggi says. “So our choice of Go as the language was actually very good, because we were able to iterate quickly on the microservices, or the interfaces, tRPC, etc.”
Teranode has been able to build blocks and validate a million TPS for over a year now.
“It has been a long journey, because the first task we had was to prove the architecture could scale. And we did that during the London Blockchain Conference last year, we proved that it did a million transactions a second. But it was a prototype. It was doing all the transaction validation, block-building, propagation, it was doing all that, but it wasn’t handling edge cases very well.”
Ironing out those edge cases has constituted most of the work the team has done since then, along with making sure everything was backwards-compatible with (the current) SV Node. SV Node looks comparatively easy, he adds. If SV Node is a solo singer playing a guitar on stage, then Teranode is more like conducting an orchestra.
“There’s all these microservices, all these things floating around, there’s concurrency issues, timings, edge cases. And we have to deal with all of it … the first six months were fun, and it’s been painful ever since.”
Their pain, your gain
Oli describes the feeling as being “like at the end of ‘Lord of the Rings’,” where Sam and Frodo have traveled through Mordor and are finally about to toss the ring into Mount Doom. It’s the end of a long quest and journey, with its happy ending now in sight.
Well, it’s the end of a long and difficult journey for Teranode’s designers and developers, but in reality, this is just the conclusion of the first chapter. Teranode’s real story is just beginning, and once the world starts using it, it shouldn’t ever end. Unbounded means unbounded; not just in raw technical capabilities, but also in potential.
Watch: Teranode is the digital backbone of Bitcoin
Recommended for you
