With the constant forward movement in technological innovations on the Ethereum’s [ETH] blockchain such as sharding and the Plasma project, Ripple enthusiasts are worried about the growth in transaction speed. At an undisputed 1500 transactions per second, Ripple provides fast and, at times, instant settlement, with the average transaction speed around 3-5 seconds.

A Reddit post clarifying these worries as Killerbeegi said:

“I know that XRP can currently do 1500 TPS vs ETH 15 or so. But I know Ethereum is researching Sharding and Plasma and bypassing POW. …How will Ripple be able to compete with that level of performance? Would Ripple implement a similar technology? I know they must be aware of their competition from Ethereum but 1,000,000 TPS seems like the golden ticket to beating out all competition.”

The Ethereum blockchain aims to scale to required transaction speeds. At its current speed of 15 transactions per second, it is widely outstripped by competitors. Some widely used dApps clog the blockchain with the number of transactions conducted, such as the Cryptokitties incident.

This is seen to change with the implementation of the Plasma protocol. The Plasma protocol is independent of the base-layer Proof of Stake algorithm on Ethereum, yet complementary to it. It functions on the Raiden architecture. It allows for incentivized and enforced the execution of smart contracts which is scalable to a significant amount of state updates per second.

Sharding is a database partitioning technology that separates large databases, as seen on the blockchain, into smaller and faster parts that are more easily manageable. These parts are called data shards. As seen on the Zilliqa blockchain, a sharding protocol may scale transaction speeds exponentially through digital processing.

Ripple, on the other hand, utilizes a cooperatively distributed agreement protocol known as the Ripple Protocol. It is a Byzantine Consensus algorithm, which validates transactions based on proposals from an ‘N’ number of peers. It also allows for high efficiency in electricity and regular ledger close intervals on an average of 4 seconds.

It also does not require miners for block creation, as it does not function on Proof of Work like Bitcoin or Ethereum. This comes with an immunity to 51% attacks.

Moreover, a proposed update known as the Cobalt algorithm is said to increase the speed and dependability of the XRP Ledger. It is said to bring the transaction speed down to 1 second. It is an atomic broadcast algorithm that works on the Ripple protocol that guarantees, through probability, that forward progress will be made on the network even when asynchrony occurs.

User Sukrim, however, detailed why Ethereum has difficulties scaling, saying:

“XRPL has a lot of breathing room until these numbers are reached, Ethereum too. Depending on the safety and finality guarantees of Plasma etc. there might be some similar issues to Lightning – everything’s fine as long as everything works, but if suddenly a large amount of money wants to leave a shard or close channels then it again matters how much the lowest layer can process. For scaling XRPL, Ripple currently mostly focuses on promoting Payment Channels and Interledger connectors using them.”

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