1. Introduction

With the gradual maturity of blockchain and Web3.0 technology, there is an increasing number and complexity of applications such as cryptocurrency exchanges, GameFi, NFT trading platforms, and e-commerce platforms that support digital currencies. In such a diverse and highly interactive environment, high-concurrency transactions have become a fundamental requirement. The ability to handle high-concurrency transactions directly affects platform stability, user experience, and business scalability.

Through this article, we hope to provide readers with a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the difficulties, pain points, significance, and effective approaches to high-concurrency transactions.

2. Why do we need high-concurrency system design?

(1) Cryptocurrency Exchanges

Cryptocurrency exchanges often face drastic market fluctuations. During these highly volatile periods, a large number of traders, studios, and quantitative trading teams may simultaneously perform a large number of trading operations. How can the exchange quickly and accurately process these trading requests? If the exchange handles them improperly, there may be issues such as trading delays, missing out on the best trading opportunities, and even system crashes.

(2) GameFi

GameFi is an emerging field that combines gaming and finance, where players can earn and manage their digital assets through games. Game assets are mostly represented by on-chain tokens and NFTs. Whenever a new game or event is launched, a large number of players may rush in to forge, claim, or trade their digital assets in the game. As a GameFi game project, how can you ensure that all these players can log in smoothly and participate successfully at the same time? This is not only a server load issue but also involves various aspects such as data processing and network latency.

(3) NFT Trading Platforms

NFT trading platforms also face similar problems to GameFi. When well-known artists release limited edition NFTs, or when a popular IP collaborates with the market for sales, a large number of collectors and investors will rush to try to obtain these scarce resources. In this case, how can the stability of the NFT trading platform be ensured?

(4) E-commerce platforms supporting digital currency

During the Double 11 event on Taobao, when you and tens of thousands of people compete to buy a high-value-for-money clothing item, how can it be ensured that the item will not be oversold? With the continuous development of the web3 industry, more and more e-commerce platforms are beginning to support digital currency payments. These e-commerce platforms will also encounter the high concurrency issues faced by web2 e-commerce platforms. How can they process tens of thousands of digital currency orders in 1 second, ensuring that each transaction can be processed quickly and accurately, avoiding system crashes, and providing a high-quality shopping experience for each customer?

3. Characteristics of high-concurrency system design

(1) Actual application scenarios of high concurrency

Let's take a digital currency exchange as an example. Deposit and withdrawal of digital currency are core functions of exchanges and wallet applications, and these two operations are directly related to users' assets. Under normal operations, the deposit and withdrawal processes may appear relatively simple:

Deposit process

Generate deposit address: When a user requests a deposit on an exchange or wallet, the system will generate a unique deposit address for the user.

User transfer: The user sends the digital currency from an external wallet or another exchange to the deposit address generated in the previous step.

Exchange monitoring and confirmation: The exchange or wallet application will monitor and check the transactions related to the deposit address. It will monitor the number of confirmations of the transaction on the network to ensure its validity.

Confirmation requirements met: Most exchanges require a certain number of confirmations on the blockchain (e.g., 3 or 6 confirmations) before considering a transaction valid. This reduces the risk of double spending.

Deposit to user account: Once the transaction has sufficient confirmations, the exchange will add the amount of digital currency to the user's exchange account balance.

Notification to Users: Users will receive a notification informing them that their recharge has been completed.

Withdrawal Process

User Initiates Withdrawal Request: Users input the amount of digital currency they want to withdraw and the destination address within the exchange or wallet application.

Security Verification: To ensure the legitimacy of the withdrawal request, users may need to undergo secondary verification, such as SMS verification, email confirmation, or Google Authenticator.

Request Processing: The exchange's backend system receives the withdrawal request and conducts preliminary processing, such as checking user balances and withdrawal limits.

Manual Review (Possible Step): Some exchanges have a manual review step to enhance security, where large withdrawal requests are manually reviewed by human personnel.

Signing and Broadcasting to the Blockchain: The exchange signs the withdrawal transaction with a private key and broadcasts it to the corresponding public chain.

Exchange Monitoring Confirmation: Similar to deposits, the exchange monitors the confirmation status of the withdrawal transaction on the blockchain.

Withdrawal Completed: Once the transaction receives sufficient confirmations, the withdrawal process is completed, and the user's exchange account balance will be reduced accordingly.

Notification to Users: Users will receive a notification informing them that their withdrawal has been completed.

(Transaction Process)

This process is very clear and simple to implement. However, if there is a major market fluctuation or significant news events, you may find that the number of recharge and withdrawal operations can reach up to 10,000 per second. Can the asset management system handle 10,000 concurrent asset operations per second? If all the requests go through, we would need to generate 10,000 transaction orders simultaneously. Can the database handle this load? If not, what should we do? These issues may arise and render the previous solution inadequate, requiring the design of a new approach.

In addition, when it comes to using caching, in low-concurrency scenarios, you only need to understand the basic usage. However, in high-concurrency scenarios, you need to pay attention to cache hit rate, how to deal with cache penetration, how to avoid cache avalanche, how to solve cache consistency issues, etc. This increases the complexity of the design scheme and also requires higher abilities from the designers.

Therefore, maintaining and monitoring high-concurrency environments often require professional technical teams. In order to maintain system stability, companies need to invest more manpower costs. This not only increases short-term costs but may also lead to an increase in long-term operation and maintenance costs.

(II) High-concurrency system design methods

When we talk about the design of high-concurrency systems, we are actually discussing how to effectively manage and manipulate large-scale traffic. The core charm of this design lies in cleverly resisting the impact of traffic, thereby bringing users a smoother user experience.

Taking historical lessons, we can draw inspiration from the water control strategies of the Yangtze River and the Yellow River. For example, Dayu widened the river channel to make the flow smoother, Dujiangyan divided the water of the Minjiang River through diversion, and the strategies of the Sanmenxia and Gezhouba reservoirs. These strategies can be seen as early high-concurrency system design methods. Their core is to split or store large traffic, allowing it to flow smoothly.

There are three main design strategies for high-concurrency systems:

Horizontal scaling

This strategy is like "divide and conquer" in water control, by deploying distributed systems and redirecting traffic to multiple servers. Each server only needs to handle a portion of the concurrency and traffic. For example, for a large-scale user promotion, to deal with a huge amount of user traffic, it will be deployed across multiple nodes, evenly distributing user shopping requests to each server, ensuring the smooth operation of the website.

Caching

Using caching in high-concurrency environments is like "widening the river channel". Caching can significantly improve system performance by reducing reliance on disk, making data access faster. Since the disk seek time is much larger than the CPU and memory access time, using memory as a cache can greatly reduce system bottlenecks. For example, for a user promotion, to reduce the query pressure on the database, the information of popular items will be cached in advance. So when a user requests this information, the system can directly read it from the cache, greatly improving query speed.

Asynchronous processing

Asynchronous processing allows for handling more requests within a given time period. It enables the system to respond quickly to users, freeing up resources to handle more requests, and notifying users of the processing results at the appropriate time. The asynchronous processing pattern is particularly suitable for requests that involve long processing times or dependencies on multiple internal systems. For example, in a ticket booking platform during holidays, when a user places an order, the platform does not immediately return the order result but informs the user that the order is being processed. The backend system puts the order request into a message queue and processes it one by one through a background service. When the order processing is completed, the user is notified through a push service.

However, designing a highly concurrent system does not mean that all these strategies must be used simultaneously. The design and evolution of the system should be progressive, with the goal of solving actual problems in the system. In the early stages, a simple system design and familiar technological framework may be sufficient to cope with the existing traffic and business requirements. However, as traffic grows and business changes, more advanced technologies and strategies must be considered to ensure system availability and performance.

IV. Cregis' High Concurrency Advantage

Cregis is a comprehensive Web3 asset collaboration management platform, providing a mature and stable payment infrastructure and rich financial management collaboration features. It has been operating safely for 6 years, serving over 3200 Web3.0 projects and institutions and providing 5.78 million blockchain wallet addresses to end users.

In 6 years, Cregis has spent time developing "high-concurrency transactions" + "wallet" + "financial management features". Based on customer needs, Cregis has implemented high-concurrency clearing technology from web2 to web3. It can provide customers with commercial-grade digital currency high-concurrency transaction settlement infrastructure. With our API, we can easily process 600,000 concurrent transaction orders in 1 minute, and we can handle over 900 million dollars worth of on-chain transactions within 24 hours, which is not yet the limit of our product performance.

V. Summary

With the increasing maturity and widespread application of Web3.0 technology, whether it is a digital currency exchange, blockchain game (GameFi), NFT trading platform, or other Web3.0 applications, they will all face increasingly complex transaction scenarios. The ability to process a large number of transactions quickly and securely not only improves user experience but also plays an important role in the competitiveness of companies.

If a platform can remain stable and smooth even under high traffic, users are more likely to continue using the platform. At the same time, many large enterprises and project owners consider high concurrency processing capability as an important factor when choosing partners. High concurrency is not only a technical problem but also a comprehensive challenge involving technology, operations, and business strategy, among other aspects. Only by considering and optimizing comprehensively can one stand out in the fierce market competition.

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