Is Vodafone the best Value in Digital Currency?
The combination of M-Pesa and Vodafone’s mobile customer base is one of the greatest untapped resources in business today. If digital currencies like M-Pesa become widely used Vodafone could sit on a gold mine.
For example, Vodafone claims to have processed 529 transactions a second with its M-pesa unencrypted digital currency in December 2016. Therefore, Vodafone could have solved the blockchain scalability problem before most of us heard of it.
To explain, the blockchain scalability problem is the speed and size limit that keeps cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) from processing large volumes of transactions. For instance, Ethereum will process 15 to 20 transactions a second and it is faster than Bitcoin.
Moreover, Bitcoin’s capabilities are far lower than Ethereum’s. In particular, most estimates show Bitcoin will only process three to four transactions a second. Although, I have seen Bitcoin transaction volume estimates as high as 10 per second.
M-pesa, on the other hand, achieves high volumes of transactions by sacrificing encryption. Thus Vodafone is already using a solution that Ripple (XRP), the Lightning Network, and the Raiden Network are experimenting with. The solution is a sidechain, a less encrypted digital shortcut to speed processing.
Read More