diff --git a/bigchaindb/common/schema/__init__.py b/bigchaindb/common/schema/__init__.py
index a69793ad..cc4bfb9d 100644
--- a/bigchaindb/common/schema/__init__.py
+++ b/bigchaindb/common/schema/__init__.py
@@ -3,6 +3,8 @@ import os.path
 
 import jsonschema
 import yaml
+import rapidjson
+import rapidjson_schema
 
 from bigchaindb.common.exceptions import SchemaValidationError
 
@@ -25,7 +27,8 @@ def _load_schema(name):
     with open(path) as handle:
         schema = yaml.safe_load(handle)
     drop_schema_descriptions(schema)
-    return path, schema
+    fast_schema = rapidjson_schema.loads(rapidjson.dumps(schema))
+    return path, (schema, fast_schema)
 
 
 TX_SCHEMA_PATH, TX_SCHEMA_COMMON = _load_schema('transaction')
@@ -36,10 +39,27 @@ VOTE_SCHEMA_PATH, VOTE_SCHEMA = _load_schema('vote')
 
 def _validate_schema(schema, body):
     """ Validate data against a schema """
+
+    # Note
+    #
+    # Schema validation is currently the major CPU bottleneck of
+    # BigchainDB. the `jsonschema` library validates python data structures
+    # directly and produces nice error messages, but validation takes 4+ ms
+    # per transaction which is pretty slow. The rapidjson library validates
+    # much faster at 1.5ms, however it produces _very_ poor error messages.
+    # For this reason we use both, rapidjson as an optimistic pathway and
+    # jsonschema as a fallback in case there is a failure, so we can produce
+    # a helpful error message.
+
     try:
-        jsonschema.validate(body, schema)
-    except jsonschema.ValidationError as exc:
-        raise SchemaValidationError(str(exc)) from exc
+        schema[1].validate(rapidjson.dumps(body))
+    except ValueError as exc:
+        try:
+            jsonschema.validate(body, schema[0])
+        except jsonschema.ValidationError as exc2:
+            raise SchemaValidationError(str(exc2)) from exc2
+        raise Exception('jsonschema did not raise an exception, wheras rapidjson raised',
+                        exc)
 
 
 def validate_transaction_schema(tx):
diff --git a/setup.py b/setup.py
index 55543ea3..4fd485c0 100644
--- a/setup.py
+++ b/setup.py
@@ -79,6 +79,7 @@ install_requires = [
     'jsonschema~=2.5.1',
     'pyyaml~=3.12',
     'aiohttp~=2.0',
+    'python-rapidjson-schema==0.1.1',
 ]
 
 setup(