Why isn’t the blockchain scalable?

Currently, all blockchain consensus protocols (eg. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Tendermint) have a challenging limitation: every fully participating node in the network must process every transaction. Recall that blockchains have one inherent critical characteristic — “decentralization” — which means that every single node on the network processes every transaction and maintains a copy of the entire state.

While a decentralization consensus mechanism offers some critical benefits )fault tolerance, a strong guarantee of security, political neutrality, etc.) comes at the cost of scalability.