What is going on with Teranode?

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What is up with Teranode? This week, Siggi Óskarsson joined Kurt Wuckert Jr. on the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream to update us. Teranode should be live in early 2025.

Teranode progress in the past six months

Óskarsson kicks things off with an overview of Teranode progress in the last six months. The Teranode team has done several big tests since the last time he appeared on the live stream.

In April, they successfully tested 1 million transactions per second with three nodes. However, they upped the ante during the London Blockchain Conference 2024 and tested the same transaction volume with six nodes. Óskarsson says that, during the six-node test, nodes weren’t doing everything they should usually do, but they were building blocks, validating transactions, and more.

After some debugging, there’s now one node listening on the mainnet. They’re now at the stage where 20% of the work that takes 80% of the time is ongoing. It’s going to be a challenge, but they’ll get there.

Throughout all of this, the Teranode team has used research from nChain and has been working with Aerospike. The latter has been helping with UTXO storage and can scale much bigger than it is right now. Óskarsson clarifies some confusion around the transaction volume: there are 3 million database operations per second in Aerospike, but there are actually 1 million Bitcoin transactions per second on the BSV Blockchain.

Is Teranode IP protected?

Wuckert asks an important question about Teranode’s intellectual property—what’s to stop other Bitcoin forks from coming along and using it once it’s successful?

Óskarsson says he’s an “open-source fanatic,” but the discussions around this are still occurring. A lot of money has been invested in it, and someone has to pay for that. While he believes things at the base layer should be free, he doesn’t have a definitive answer to this question yet.

Speaking of base layer functionality, Óskarsson brings up SegWit, calling it insidious. It’s not strictly speaking a protocol change, he says. It’s more akin to poking a hole through the Bitcoin protocol, leaving the chain broken on a fundamental level. So, while developers could try to implement Teranode on BTC, much has changed regarding economics and more, meaning it wouldn’t necessarily work.

What does the next six months look like?

Óskarsson once again mentions the 80/20 rule. Right now, they’re doing the testing and quality work, which will take time. In Q4 2024, they’ll start mining, and Q1 2025 will be the wrap-up with a final cleanup and documentation process.

What will happen to SV Node? It will sunset slowly, he says. It’s capable of tens of thousands of transactions per second or more itself, and it will run alongside Teranode for a while.

How do we get to the next million transactions after this? The team has done some preliminary math, and Teranode is horizontally scalable. Some elements such as block assembly aren’t shared yet, and there are some bottlenecks around that. He says it could probably do 6 million transactions per second with the current architecture, with 10 million at a push, but after that, some reengineering would be required.

If Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) decided it wanted to use Teranode, when would it be ready? Óskarsson says it could be by 2026. While some seasoned engineers could make things go a little faster, many still don’t understand Bitcoin, so there’d still be a learning curve involved.

What’s the most important thing Óskarsson has learned from all of this? The importance of infrastructure. He notes how, by pushing the limits, the Teranode team even brought AWS to its limits. Part of that is due to how they ran it, he says, but they had to think of ways to architect around the limitations they encountered.

To learn more about how ARC will talk to Teranode, why it alone is not enough, and for more information on the project’s progress, watch the live stream via this link.

Watch: Teranode is the future of the Bitcoin network