The team behind Facebook’s Libra have done an experimental research into a payments protocol called FastPay that is seven times faster than the Visa system.
Libra is a stablecoin developed by Facebook, based on a permissioned blockchain payment system, managed through the Libra Association. To carry on the transactions between different parties, the social media company has introduced its Novi wallet.
Now the company is just experimenting, with the final goal to roll out global payment system and a financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people. The researchers who are working on the project have presented the results of their research into the new payments protocol, which is open source.
‘FastPay allows a set of distributed authorities, to maintain a high-integrity and availability settlement system for pre-funded payments. It can be used to settle payments in a native unit of value (cryptocurrency), or as a financial side infrastructure to support retail payments in fiat currencies. FastPay is based on Byzantine Consistent Broadcast as its core primitive, foregoing the expenses of full atomic commit channels (consensus).’
The team’s experiments demonstrate intra-continental confirmation latency of less than 100ms, making FastPay applicable to point of sale payments. In laboratory environments, they have achieved over 80,000 transactions per second with 20 authorities, thus surpassing the requirements of current retail card payment networks, while significantly increasing their robustness.
Moreover, according to the team, FastPay could eliminate counterparty and credit risks of net settlement and remove the need for intermediate banks, and complex financial contracts between them, to absorb these risks.
You can read more about the research here.
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