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Two sources:

In the first link, Edmund Edgar kindly listed several scaling options for Ethereum. In the second link, which includes a part of ONO (a messaging app running on EOS) white paper, the author estimates that the blockchain may need to run more than 600 transactions per second for 5 million users of such messaging app.

There are hundreds of millions of Whatsapp users, thus 60000 transactions per second would probably be required for such an app. Would Ethereum network ever be able to support apps with such scale after the scaling updates?

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  • I think your use of WhatsApp as an example is rather misleading as Ethereum can never support services like WhatsApp as everything is deterministic - no information from outside can be used without certain unwanted tricks (oracles). But if your question is more of "can Ethereum ever support X transaction per second", then it sounds more reasonable - although can't answer that one either.
    – Lauri Peltonen
    Jun 16 '18 at 14:17
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Why would all of those messages between users need to be stored on the blockchain? IMO a better approach is to do something like what Peepeth does and use IPFS for data storage, and allow bundling of messages. However I don't see the need for a messaging app to have its message passing use the blockchain at all. Just pass the messages completely off-chain because messaging apps really don't need all their messages to be on-chain.

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  • There's a paragraph from the ONO whitepaper, 'The content data established by ONO users will use the private key of the users to enable encryption. Also, the encrypted data will be stored in the decentralized DHT distributive storage network, for example, IPFS. The Hash of the data will be stored in the blockchain. The users with the proper authority can quote it by smart contracts, thus addressing the data.' I know that messages are not stored on the blockchain, but in order to authorize users for certain contents, you'd need smart contracts thus transactions on chain? ONO estimates a big #.
    – frt132
    Jun 17 '18 at 3:15
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I agree with @flygoing. Not everything should be on the blockchain. It would be best to use something like BitMessage of Telegram, the former being much more decentralized, to send messages, IPFS to share files, and the Ethereum blockchain for things like transferring value, interacting with smart contracts, etc.

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