Blockchains create trustless ledgers for currency and computation. This is valuable, both as a censorship-resistant store of value, and as a medium for supporting decentralized applications (DApps) such as virtual exchanges, digital banks, and online games. While these apps are fairly simple right now, they are rapidly becoming more advanced and useful.

Growth in the DApp space is dependent on significant improvements in the underlying blockchains. Existing blockchains are extremely slow by today’s computing standards. A typical transaction in crypto today corresponds to a single user action like “deposit funds into a virtual bank” or “play a card in a decentralized card game”, and it entails executing a few hundred instructions (ADD, JUMP, etc) of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode, the nearly-ubiquitous standard for blockchain programs. Ethereum itself supports ~10 such transactions per second (tps), while the fastest EVM-compatible competitor supports about 200 tps.

This essay first reviews the existing landscape of blockchain throughput, then makes a case for much higher throughput to support more complex apps and many multiples of the current user count.

Current Landscape

Today’s top L1 blockchains:

Ethereum

Ethereum throughput is 10tps.

Eth DAUs stand at 500k; there are 1M transactions per day. Much higher throughput is needed to support mainstream adoption (e.g. 100M DAUs would be 200x assuming similar engagement level; could imagine this 100xing further if users do 200 transactions per day instead of 2).

EVM-compatible alt L1s

EVM support is crucial given its ubiquity amongst crypto devs, similar to Javascript in web2. Supporting EVM makes it easier for devs to reuse knowledge and libraries.

Alt L1s with EVM support have up to 20x higher throughput; see this comparison from Dragonfly Capital. While this might sound impressive, it is starting from an extremely low baseline; much higher throughput is actually needed for mass adoption.

In our view, the low throughput of existing alternatives is because they reuse the VM from geth, focusing on innovativing on the consensus algorithm side. Increases in throughput come from altering gas limit and block time (which Eth could also do, at least in PoS).

See the table below for links to each chain’s EVM implementation in github, and compare it to Ethereum’s.

Chain Example smart contract call Example SC’s med gas Block size (gas) Block time TPS (= GasLimit / GasPerCall / BlockTime) EVM impl (https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/tree/master/core/vm)
Eth UniswapV3 https://etherscan.io/txs?a=0x68b3465833fb72a70ecdf485e0e4c7bd8665fc45 130k 15m (https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/gas/#block-size) 13s (https://etherscan.io/chart/blocktime) 8.87 https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/tree/master/core/vm
Avalanche* C-Chain Trader Joe https://snowtrace.io/address/0x60ae616a2155ee3d9a68541ba4544862310933d4 150k 8m (https://medium.com/avalancheavax/apricot-phase-three-c-chain-dynamic-fees-432d32d67b60) ~1s 53 https://github.com/ava-labs/coreth/tree/master/core/vm
Polygon Quickswap https://polygonscan.com/address/0xa5e0829caced8ffdd4de3c43696c57f7d7a678ff 120k 30m (https://polygonscan.com/blocks) 2s (https://polygonscan.com/chart/blocktime) 125 https://github.com/maticnetwork/bor/tree/master/core/vm
Fantom Opera SpookySwap https://ftmscan.com/address/0xf491e7b69e4244ad4002bc14e878a34207e38c29 150k 20.5m (https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/go-opera/blob/master/opera/rules.go#L129) ~1s (https://ftmscan.com/chart/blocktime) 136 https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/go-opera/tree/master/evmcore (compare vs https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/tree/af5c97aebe1d37486635521ef553cb8bd4bada13/core)
BNB Chain PancakeSwap https://bscscan.com/address/0x10ed43c718714eb63d5aa57b78b54704e256024e 120k 80m (https://bscscan.com/chart/gaslimit) 3s (https://bscscan.com/chart/blocktime) 222 https://github.com/bnb-chain/bsc/tree/master/core/vm

** In marketing materials, Avalanche claims 4500 TPS but it’s only for their X-Chain, which only processes token transfers (no smart contract execution)*

The below screenshot of real metrics from https://ethtps.info/ is consistent with the above:

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Solana

At a 100x speedup to Eth, Solana represents the most interesting blockchain in our view. Solana throughput is ~1000 tps (note, live stats show 2500-3000 tps but >60% of those transactions are actually validators voting on the next block; citation). Solana does not support EVM although Neon Labs (not live) is trying to do this.

The case for radically higher throughput

We aim to build an EVM-compatible smart contract execution platform that is meaningfully faster: at least 10000 tps.

Why do we need such high throughput? For example, why isn’t 200 tps enough?

High throughput and speed are essential for building real-world applications. Examples include:

Everyone understands the potential of blockchain in offering decentralized networks supporting composability and community ownership:

We seek to unlock innovation, and facilitate wider adoption of decentralized apps, by building a much more performant base layer.

For more information on how you can get involved, see our open opportunities at https://monad.xyz/open-opportunities.