A new blockchain system developed by NYU computer scientists has shattered performance records by processing over five million transactions every two seconds—a rate up to 100 times faster than its closest competitors while using a fraction of the energy.
The system, called Bounce, represents a radical departure from traditional blockchain design by utilizing satellites orbiting Earth to maintain the sequence of transactions, dramatically improving speed while eliminating many security vulnerabilities.
“The benefit of satellites is that they are hard to access, are secure against side-channel attacks, and their processing can be made tamper-resistant,” explains Dennis Shasha, professor of computer science at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and senior author of the research published in the journal MDPI Network.
In the Bounce system, encodings of transactions reach a designated satellite during specific time slots. The satellite then orders these transactions and “bounces” them back to Earth, creating an unambiguous sequence that prevents the possibility of blockchain “forks”—splits in the ledger that can enable double-spending attacks.
The research team, which included undergraduate Xiaoteng Liu and former graduate student Taegyun Kim (now at Datadog), conducted experiments using CloudLab infrastructure with satellite communication times based on tests with the International Space Station.
What sets Bounce apart from existing blockchain systems is not just its speed but its remarkable efficiency. The system consumes less than 0.05 joules of energy per transaction, compared to over 1,000 joules for Solana (currently considered one of the fastest blockchains) and more than a million joules for Bitcoin transactions.
The performance improvements address a long-standing limitation of blockchain technology. While Bitcoin introduced blockchain to mainstream awareness in 2009, most systems still struggle with slow transaction speeds and high energy costs that limit practical applications.
“The Bounce protocol on the satellite computers is so simple, it can be burned into read-only memory, thus preventing software-injection attacks,” notes Shasha, who also serves as associate director of NYU Wireless.
For users, the system promises transaction confirmation times of just 3 to 10 seconds—comparable to traditional credit card processing. The researchers have also designed a two-tier service model with “premium” transactions receiving faster processing than “economy” transactions.
Beyond improving speed, Bounce’s satellite-based approach provides natural advantages against hackers. Satellites operate hundreds of kilometers above Earth, making physical access nearly impossible and creating a natural broadcast capability that enhances security against communication disruptions.
The study was supported by NYU Wireless, an academic research center at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering that advances wireless technology. While cautioning that “real-world deployment may present some practical challenges,” Shasha believes “Bounce provides a foundation for future research and development of high-performance, energy-efficient, globally accessible blockchain systems.”
For an industry struggling to overcome performance limitations, this celestial approach to blockchain could represent the breakthrough needed to finally make distributed ledger technology practical for everyday transactions.
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