Turkey holds an esteemed position in the world of cryptocurrencies. Moreover, Turkish cryptocurrency transactionplatforms begin to reach important levels in the world regarding the trading volume. For instance, on some days during the recent months, Paribu reached 200,000 visitors who executed transactions in the same minute. I would like to treat what it exactly means in this article.
Cemil Şinasi Türün
Advisory Board Member of Paribu
There are many websites that host millions of people or even more instantly in the world. This has not always been like this, we reached this point step by step. 20 years ago, while the number of total web users in Turkey was estimated as two and a half millions, we created a simple HTML site for a national campaign. Once the advertorial we prepared for a beverage company was broadcasted on TV in the evening and the website address appeared at the end, the whole country flowed to the website: I witnessed with my eyes how exactly 2 million individual visitors crashed through the doors of the website. On that day, our humble website hardly survived, and please pay attention to the fact that it was only a very simple website of two pages.
Special operating system architectures have been developed
As time passed, frequently visited websites emerged in the world and after the visitors reached high numbers, this issue became an R&D challenge for the social websites and search engines such as Yahoo and Google, then Facebook and YouTube. The development of websites to host millions of instant visitors was started. However, these were platforms where visitors were not in interaction with each other, but directly with the website. First on Facebook, then on Instagram and finally on WhatsApp and similar applications, both busy traffic and the interaction between the users were handled at a high level. The users were now able to “chat” with each other and to send messages and images instantly to each other.
Google Search Engine has been operating on a global network for a long time and the data are stored in a gigantic global RAM, in other words, Google lives in a pure electronic space. No data is written to or read from a disk, by this means instantly 100 million visitors are provided with service very rapidly. Special operating system architectures were developed to achieve this. An open-source technology called Hadoop was designed to handle such congestions.
However, financial transactions were unable to be executed on these websites. The people would only carry out searches, chat among each other or share cat images. If the texts vanished or the images were deleted occasionally, no one would revolt and invade the offices of Facebook or Google.
A user number of hundreds of millions is now ordinary for social networks
Today, it has already become normal for social networks to simultaneously host millions or even hundreds of millions of users. These users can be divided into groups and assigned to different servers. Therefore, the number of visitors who instantly, i.e. simultaneously visit a website do not pose a threat. In terms of attracting large numbers of visitors, e-commerce websites follow the social networks, and there are several e-commerce giants in Turkey.
On these e-commerce websites, apart from visiting pages, people can purchase goods and services and until quite recently, the pages to execute such transactions were provided by banks. When the banks remain unwieldy to solve this issue, specialized payment systems, such as Stripe in the world and İyzico in Turkey, emerged. On e-commerce websites, the payment of the purchase is performed on a specific page that is not a part of the general website traffic and these pages are operated by these infrastructure companies. On e-commerce websites, everything is directly between the website and the users, and there are no financial transactions or instant trading among the users.
Why are the cryptocurrency transaction platforms are different?
The crypto asset transaction platforms, in other words, stock markets, which have been developed during the recent years and started to enter into our lives, do not resemble any of the structures mentioned above whose issues were resolved earlier. Please take attention that in this case, visitors of the website or application are not in a relatively simple relationship with some pages such as reading/marking and finally purchasing a product.
On these new platforms, users visiting the application and other users who simultaneously visit the website live execute trading transactions between each other. On top of that, all these transactions consist of dynamic data: In other words, they cannot be suspended for a long time, they require to be stored from time to time and the transactions are saved to traditional data base structures. Otherwise it will be too risky. Monetary relationships are extremely sensitive, any possible chaotic environment can never be tolerated.
In short, the stock markets should proceed with providing services to 200 thousand simultaneous visitors while every transaction is being written to disks and to traditional databases and there lies the core of the problem.
Consequently, there are neither sessions that will not create a significant problem when they are lost unlike the ones on the social networks, nor the trading transactions (among the users) performed here can be jeopardized. Were there similar structures and systems in the past? Yes, there were. However, they only existed within the financial structures, such as Wall Street, through which billions of dollars were earned, and they had hundreds or maximum a few thousand customers. There were and still are software and hardware companies working for Wall Street that sell customized solutions for millions of dollars. But this information is not provided from an open source such as Hadoop. They continue to be kept as a trade secret.
Similar structures existed in the online games as well, and a limited amount of money in the game would be exchanged between players. For instance, the game called “Eve Online” had to keep ten thousand players simultaneously on RAM (not on disk). However, even in these examples, keeping the financial transactions suspended between users, i.e. on RAM, poses a great risk.
The risk with games is definitely not comparable to the same on cryptocurrency transaction platforms, what is jeopardized on such platforms is real-world money. No one can risk losing that. Even with this being the case, there is a continuous dispute between the online game players and system owners.
Moving on to blockchain
Blockchains brought a brand-new paradigm apart from all the structures that are previously mentioned. Financial records are not kept on the database anymore, but they are directly written on the blockchain. On one hand, the records are stored on the blockchain in a strongly safe manner. On the other hand, there are high costs regarding both miner fees and time. With this being the case, all platforms in the world keep the transactions on their platforms and update the relevant records on blockchain now and then.
As you see, domestic platforms now facing the same level of challenge which global exchanges had to tackle a couple of years ago. Paribu is placed among the leading platforms in the world for an instant trading volume of 200 thousand.
TL, DR;
All in all, what we need to realize is that this is a high-level R&D issue. Just as Turkey’s reaching a prestigious position in the world defense industry with our UAVs, today we hold an important place in cryptocurrency transactions, and we deal with the rest by performing R&D and exert efforts in this field.
As users, we should acknowledge that this is a challenging issue that involves high technology and is completely or partially unresolved, but whose specifics are kept discreet.
Bu içerik en son 26 October 2022 tarihinde güncellenmiştir.
