Crypto custody
firm Casa released results from its test to find a new way to connect
to the Bitcoin network and found ElectrumX had the best bang for the
buck.


Casa founder and cypherpunk Jameson Lopp noted the
custody firm recently rewrote its backend infrastructure to support
Electrum based on the tests.


The company chose three
different server implementations for the test: ElectrumX, Electra and
Esplora Electrs. It discounted three other servers, Electrum-Server,
Electrum Personal Server and Bitcoin Wallet Tracker as they felt these
were not designed for high performance.


For the testing,
Lopp said Casa wanted to understand the performance characteristics of
each implementation. They ran a list of 103,000 addresses with more than
100 transactions as their main data set for the test. It found in the
first test run alone that one of the server options could already be
taken out.



“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
the field narrowed to two, Lopp said they turned to query performance.
Here they found ElectrumX only took more than 20 milliseconds to return a
transaction history compared to Esplora’s hundreds of milliseconds for
simpler queries. However, for larger and more complex ones, particularly
those with high unspent output from Bitcoin transactions, it was
Esplora that shined. Casa saw Esplora was able to scale well.



“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.”