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| Facebook's FastPay payments network is seven times faster than the Visa network |
The research, co-sponsored by academics, was conducted by scientists from the Novi division - Facebook's digital wallet - and developed a money transfer system called FastPay.
According to Facebook, the system can be used for payments in cryptocurrency or as an infrastructure to support legal payments in retail.
During testing, the team was able to receive confirmations on the African continent in less than 100 milliseconds, perform up to 80,000 transactions per second, and had up to 20 different payment institutions.
While blockchain technology is designed to support applications such as personal wallets and private transactions, its open and distributed nature comes with high performance costs and scalability.
The Bank for International Settlements noted that ambiguity around the end of settlement is one of the major barriers to blockchain adoption.
The FastPay system addresses this issue by allowing authorities to jointly maintain account balances and settle pre-funded retail payments between accounts.
The system supports confirmation latency of less than 1 second, which is suitable for physical point of sale payments, and has similar capacity to the largest range of retail card network and global real-time billing.
Co-author writes: The FastPay System removes credit risk and requires intermediary banks and their complex financial contracts to internalize these risks. FastPay can adapt spam capabilities to effective retail structures of any organization.
It will take about two months to build FastPay on AWS to test. One of the servers has 96 central processing units (vCPU) and 384 GB of memory via Intel Xeon Platinum 8175.
With a payload of 1.5 million transactions, FastPay can support up to 160,000 transactions per second - nearly seven times the fastest transactions on the Visa payment network.
FastPay has effectively tested delay in processing and confirming orders. The response time for customers on the US West Coast was under 200 amps, and the response time for one customer in the UK was under 50 amps.
A Facebook spokesperson said: FastPay is a beta version of the payment protocol.
Researchers write that with reasonable safeguards and adequate programming capabilities, FastPay can be used as a side chain for any cryptocurrency.
They said: The performance and strength of FastPay has surpassed and surpassed the latest scientific developments and showed significant benefits in moving away from the central solution.