the realm of shuffling derivatives and payments. The idea is to satisfy regulators who need seamless access to financial goings-on while protecting the privacy of parties that don't wish to reveal their identities nor the details of their transactions to the general public." The Royal Bank of Scotland announced that it built a Clearing and Settlement Mechanism (CSM) based on the Ethereum distributed ledger and smart contract platform. Performance The downside is that performance issues arise because every node calculates all the smart contracts in real-time. , the Ethereum protocol could process about 25 transactions per second; this didn't change after the proof-of-stake implementation. In comparison, the Visa payment platform processes 45,000 payments per second. This has led some to question the scalability of Ethereum. On 19 December 2016, Ethereum exceeded one million transactions in a single day for the first time. Visa has also signaled interest in processing NFT and Ethereum transactions. Ethereum engineers have been working on sharding the calculations, and the next step (Ethereum 2) was presented at Ethereum's Devcon 3 in November 2017. Ethereum's blockchain uses Merkle trees for security reasons, to improve scalability, and to optimize transaction hashing. As with any Merkle tree implementation, this allows for storage savings, set membership proofs (called "Merkle proofs"), and light client synchronization. The network has faced congestion problems, such as in 2017 in relation to CryptoKitties. Regulation In the United States, the proposed Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act would treat Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies as commodities, which could then be regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Notes References External links 2015 software Blockchains Cross-platform software Cryptocurrency projects Currencies introduced in 2015 Bytecodes