A Chinese blockchain consortium called Fisco has been quietly building one of the fastest blockchain platforms in the world, capable of 100,000 transactions per second. Ethereum processes 50 transactions per second, in comparison.

Founded in 2016, Fisco emerged as an open-source project backed by major Chinese tech and financial companies including WeBank and Tencent. Philip emphasized that the chain it built needed to be not only compliant because of the regulated nature of financial services, but also scalable due to the massive volume of users that Chinese financial institutions have.

“We solved a very hard problem and have achieved very high performance, which is 100,000 transactions per second,” said Philip Pun, a partnership manager at Fisco. 

Philip Pun

This is very impressive and roughly 1,000 times faster than what Ethereum, another Layer 1 blockchain technology, is capable of, according to Philip.

He explained that the consortium developed its technology foundation using Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT) consensus technology, which allows interoperability with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) while achieving significantly higher speeds. 

The increased speed of FISCO’s blockchain offers benefits for businesses in financial services and supply chain, allowing them to process transactions much faster.

Supply chain in tea farming  

Today, this platform has become the most active blockchain consortium in China, and Philip commented that even though it is meant for the financial services industry, it has use cases that are relevant for trade finance and even agriculture.

The platform has already demonstrated its real-world value through over 400 use cases in China. One notable implementation involved helping premium tea farmers combat counterfeit products while improving crop quality. “We have IoT devices on the tea farm that collect  data like temperature, humidity, and soil conditions,”Philip explained. All this data can be available instantly via 5G connectivity to the tea manufacturer through the blockchain.

“Tea manufacturers are able to monitor the tea far very closely and generate actionable insights to improve their yield crop like the optimum time to water the plants and the optimum time to pick tea leaves.”

All of this information, including the specific type of tea and the region it is grown in, is also made available via the blockchain to tea consumers. Philip believed that this kind of transparency increases customer confidence and creates a replicable process for farmers to produce better crops.

Another significant milestone was the launch of a cross-border blockchain solution between Hong Kong and mainland China. The system helped solve a persistent challenge in cross-border banking by enabling Hong Kong banks to verify mainland Chinese citizens’ documents and assets. 

“When a Chinese citizen comes to Hong Kong and wants to get a loan from a bank in Hong Kong, they will bring physical documents that need to be verified,” Philip said. “What we did is basically hash the document, generate a unique key, and put that key on the blockchain. The bank in Hong Kong is able to retrieve that hash key and verify that the document received is the original document.”

 A blockchain hash is a digitized fingerprint of a document that ensures data integrity. that is generated via a cryptographic function. 

The system helped solve a persistent challenge in cross-border banking by enabling Hong Kong banks to verify mainland Chinese citizens’ documents and assets. 

While the technology showed promise, implementing such cross-border solutions wasn’t without its challenges. “When we talk about blockchain, it’s not just the technology but the compliance to regulations, and finding the right use case,” Philips admitted.

Despite this, Fisco has over 400 live use cases in China already, according to Philip.

Open source in nature

As one of the few blockchain platforms that is being developed as an open-source project, Fisco has maintained documentation in both English and Chinese, signaling its ambitions for international adoption. “We envision that Fisco will be adopted more outside China,”Philip said. “We wish to bring Fisco beyond China and onto a global stage.”

The platform’s architecture supports interoperability with other major blockchain networks through its cross-chain capabilities. “We have moved assets from Ethereum onto our chain, and assets from our chain onto Polygon,” Philip explained. “We (did this because we) believe that it will be a multi-chain world.”

By making its technology freely available through open-source licensing and backed by a consortium of established companies, Fisco has positioned itself to potentially become a significant player in the global blockchain landscape, particularly in scenarios requiring high-speed transaction processing and cross-border functionality.

Philip concluded, “We envision Fisco being adopted outside of China. That is what we wish to do.” Besides expanding its adoption outside of China, Fisco wants to share its experience and local use cases with other markets around the world.