Casa – ElectrumX Best Suited for Bitcoin Network Access but Esplora Scores in Scaling

Cryptocurrency custodial company Casa rolled out findings of its trial to access Bitcoin network using a different method and identified Electrum X as the best available facilitator.

Of late, Casa founder and cypherpunk Jameson Lopp stated that the custodial company upgraded its backend framework to back Electrum based on the trial.

The company selected three different server installations for the trial, namely Electra, ElectrumX and Esplora Electrs.

It eliminated three servers – Electrum-Server, Bitcoin Wallet Tracker and Electrum Personal Server – as they perceived these were not structured for top class processing.

For the trial, Lopp stated Casa preferred to assess the processing ability of each installation. They fed a list of 103,000 addresses with over 100 trades as their main data test for the trial. At the end of first test run itself, it was assessed that one of the servers were removed from the contest.

“When the first test run against electrs was halfway done, we realized that if we tried to finish 10 runs of the 103,000 address test set against electrs, it would take weeks to complete. As such, we filtered down the addresses again to a reduced set of 57,000 that had their balances affected by between 10 and 100 transactions and performed our multiple passes of tests against that address set. Thus on the resulting charts you’ll see that there is far less data for Electrs, but we believe it is sufficient to draw conclusions about overall performance.”

With just two players currently contesting, Lopp stated that they started to look at query efficiency. While ElectrumX needed only 20 milliseconds to respond with transaction history, Esplora took hundreds of milliseconds for easy queries.

Nevertheless, for bigger and cumbersome queries, specifically those with huge unspent output from Bitcoin trades, Esplora garnered the limelight. Casa also witnessed the ability of Esplora to scale in an impressive manner.

“In general, it appears that ElectrumX provides the best ‘bang for your bitcoin’ with regard to performance vs. resource requirements. But if you are willing to devote 10 times as much disk space in order to achieve maximum performance, Esplora is the way to go.”