With all signs pointing toward a lively market in the coming months, it’s a great time for any blockchain that wants to keep up with the hype to be thinking about scalability. Cardano’s “Basho” era, which we are in right now, is all about scalability. Chapter 8 of “Cardano for the Masses” covers this topic as well.

In simple terms, scalability refers to the network’s capacity to handle increasing usage. When you get into the details, what it really means to scale can include lots of things. How big should a blockchain transaction be allowed to be? What about the block itself? How fast does transaction confirmation need to be, and what threshold of reliability is acceptable?

Matsuo Basho, for whom the Basho era was named, was a Japanese poet who lived in the 1600s. To this day he is considered the grand master of Haiku poetry. Just as a Haiku famously packs layers of meaning into a few brief, structured, syllables, blockchain scalability means figuring out how to balance the quantities of data that are transmitted in a block, with how succinctly and quickly they can be transmitted.

Just tell me how fast it is

In Chapter 8,…