# Scaling Nakamoto Consensus to Thousands of Transactions per Second

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.03870 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.03870/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Implicit Model Specialization through DAG-based Decentralized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01257/) (2021)
- [Channel Balance Interpolation in the Lightning Network via Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12087/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents Conflux, a fast, scalable and decentralized blockchain system that optimistically process concurrent blocks without discarding any as forks. The Conflux consensus protocol represents relationships between blocks as a direct acyclic graph and achieves consensus on a total order of the blocks. Conflux then, from the block order, deterministically derives a transaction total order as the blockchain ledger. We evaluated Conflux on Amazon EC2 clusters with up to 20k full nodes. Conflux achieves a transaction throughput of 5.76GB/h while confirming transactions in 4.5-7.4 minutes. The throughput is equivalent to 6400 transactions per second for typical Bitcoin transactions. Our results also indicate that when running Conflux, the consensus protocol is no longer the throughput bottleneck. The bottleneck is instead at the processing capability of individual nodes.