The last submissions to the Great Reddit Scaling Back-Off were submitted with the deadline being the 31st of July 2020.
Due to the amount of Layer 2 scaling Ethereum solutions out there, all at varying degrees of success, the Reddit team made a public challenge to submit a working demo meeting their scaling requirements.
What were the Scaling Requirements of Reddit’s Crypto Community Points?
- The demo must be a live proof of concept that simulates Community Points usage for 100,000 users (It will eventually scale to all of Reddit’s 430 million users)
- Summary of cost & resource information for both on-chain & off-chain components used in the PoC, as well as cost & resource estimates for further scaling. If your PoC is not on mainnet, make note of any mainnet caveats (such as congestion issues).
- Over a 5 day period, your scaling PoC should be able to handle:
- 100,000 point claims (minting & distributing points)
- 25,000 subscriptions
- 75,000 one-off points burning
- 100,000 transfers
So How Did Solana Go in the Reddit Scaling Bake-Off?
We crushed the challenge in 5 minutes 40 seconds. The total cost was 5 SOL or about $5 to $7 USD. Check out the video below to listen to Anatoly (Solana CEO) talk about the innovations of Solana and how it will continue to scale up every year as industry standard hardware and network bandwidth also scales.
How Can Solana Help Reddit’s Community Points System Scale?
Solana doesn’t mess around with vague GWEI, Gas and Channels. It is a no bullshit no sharding blockchain that scales up with industry standard hardware and network bandwidth. It is built by engineers from Qualcomm who scale telecommunication cellular solutions to millions of users.
Just to summarise, Solana is fast and cheap:
- Max. Transactions Per Second: 59,490
- Block times: 400ms
- Cost per Transaction: $0.00001
- Decentralised across 130+ independent validator nodes
- You can build smart contracts with Rust
Read more details here:
- 7 Reasons Why DeFi Projects Will Build on Solana Blockchain
- How Solana’s Speed, Scalability and Low Fees can Enable the Next Billion User Blockchain Application
- Seriously… How Fast Can Solana Blockchain Get?
How Did Solana Compare to Other Reddit Scaling Bake-Off Submissions?
This comparison table is subject to change and is based off researching each submission. Hopefully, the scaling solution lists their result for meeting Reddit’s requirement of processing ~300,000 transactions in Time & Cost (100k point claims, 25k subs, 75k points burning & 100k transfers). If it doesn’t results may be inaccurate and is marked with “?”. Sources have been linked to the results.
| Time Rank | Cost Rank | Blockchain / Scaling Solution | Time | Cost (USD) |
| 1 | 1 | Dragonchain (demo video) | ~1 min 21 secs? (averaged from 24 hours sample) | ~$0.75? |
| 2 | 5 | StarkWare (demo video) | ~1 min 40 secs, to 6 mins (pending confirmation) | ~$1,580? |
| 3 | 3 | Solana (demo video) | 5 mins 40 secs | $5 |
| 4 | – | Syscoin | 12 mins | ? |
| 5 | – | Raiden Network (demo video) | 17 mins 18 secs? | ? |
| 6 | 4 | xDai Stable Chain (details) | 4 hrs 30 mins | $20.55 |
| 7 | – | Aztec | ~ 8.68 hours ? | ? |
| 8 | 2 | Matic (demo video) | 12 hours | $3.52 |
| 9 | – | Abridged & Kchannels | ~27 hours? | ? |
| 10 | – | Hubble Project | ~30 hours? | ? |
| 11 | – | Everest (Proposed) | ~48 hours? | $0? |
| – | – | OMG Networks | ? | Fee-less? |
| – | – | NEAR | ? | ? |
| – | – | Fuel Labs | ? | ? |
| – | – | Spacefold | ? | ? |
| – | – | zkSync | ? | $1,000? |
| – | – | SKALE (video demo) | ? | ~$349.63? |
| – | – | Meter.io | ? | ? |
| – | – | Dapp Solutions | ? | ? |
After Reddit picks Solana as the winner of the scaling bake-off, we’re going to work tirelessly to make sure we can roll out the features that Reddit wants, like community points, to the entire 430 million Reddit user base.
Anatoly – Solana CEO (Video above)
Check Out Solana’s Solution Yourself!
Try out the Solana Demo yourself at break.solana.com!
Watch the Solana Network Live Stats at solanabeach.io!
Can You Translate Ethereum Scaling Terms for Time & Cost?
Help Us Below in the Comments or on Twitter… Thanks
There are a couple of things worth mentioning about the Syscoin entry. The cost totaled $0.64 USD. That’s 100k transactions @ 0.0000582 SYS while SYS was roughly $0.11 USD. These transaction costs can be seen in the blocks linked in the proposal. Also, the 12 mins was for on-chain settlement through bitcoin-core-compliant PoW. Many more transactions could have been settled on-chain in a shorter time with involvement of additional broadcasting nodes and/or more hw resources per host. As stated in the Syscoin proposal, this was not intended to exhibit the pre-settlement Z-DAG layer which would require quite significant resources to stress-test on mainnet.