Domus Tower, a San Francisco-based startup company, has released a whitepaper that describes its blockchain capable of facilitating over 1 million transactions per second.

“In this paper, we describe the Domus Tower Blockchain, which has been benchmarked at ingesting over 1 million tranactions per second on hardware costing less than $50 per hour on Amazon’s Web Services with the potential to scale to greater than 10 million transactions per second”, the whitepaper reads.

It explains that in the current U.S. equities industry, settlement of a trade occurs 3 business days after the execution date of a trade. The paper suggests that in order to achieve real time gross settlement, blockchain technology could be used. However, using a blockchain for this application has a technical problem as blockchain implementations did not scale well for high transaction rates.

“Supporting a high rate of transactions is necessary as U.S. stock exchanges intend to support a peak of over 1 Million trades per second now and more in the future,” it added. “Therefore, the aim of this research was to design a blockchain capable of high transaction rates which could be used to settle U.S. equities in real time.”

The Domus Tower Blockchain system uses a hybrid approach in big data architecture. Instead of adopting a streaming or a batching framework, the developers have designed a custom framework to use each technique where it is most appropriate, allowing Domus to optimize its service for desired low-latency and high throughput. It records a double-entry balance sheet that tracks credits and debits; using a blockchain ensures data is immutable and append-only; and a Merkle root ensures that the entire blockchain has not been altered or corrupted.

According to the key findings, the Domus blockchain reached a maximum speed of 1.24 million transactions per second and the maximum transaction size in the test was 256 bytes.

CoinDesk reported that the company’s chief technical officer demonstrated an early version of the blockchain at the public launch of Domus Tower. In addition, the startup also announced that it was in the early phases of launching a new trust-based blockchain consortium that would be dedicated to settling equities in the US.