The Great TPS Lie: Cryptocurrency is Obsessed with Solving Problems No One Cares About

Every week, a new L1 or L2 protocol is announced with the claim “We can do 100,000 transactions per second!”

Sometimes it’s 50,000. Sometimes it’s 1,000,000. The exact number doesn’t matter because it’s almost always bullshit.

The “bigger” race for transaction speed

The scalability war has turned into crypto’s most embarrassing contest. Every new protocol has to claim to have a higher TPS than the last, regardless of whether those speeds are:

1. actually achievable outside of their AWS testnet (fact: they are not)

2. It makes sense for any real-world application

3. It’s essential for anything that humans would actually use

This obsession with throughput is the crypto version of taking a Lamborghini for a spin during rush hour. Specs aren’t the issue, the environment is.

Let’s talk real numbers

Visa, the global payments giant that processes transactions for billions of people, processes an average of about 1,700 transactions per second. Their theoretical maximum is about 24,000 TPS, but they’ve never needed that capacity in decades of operation.

Meanwhile, most blockchain projects struggle to attract even 100 daily active users.

If you have more Discord memes than you have on-chain transactions, you may just be solving an imaginary problem.

The Hidden Cost of Pursuing “Big Size” Scalability

The obsession with theoretical throughput creates real problems that hurt users.

First, there’s centralization in disguise:Pursuing high TPS often means sacrificing decentralization for a marketing number.

Then there’s security:In the rush to scale, people cut corners, which creates vulnerabilities that are eventually exploited.

Next there’s the engineering brain drain:Top talent can’t build what users actually need, and instead get stuck optimizing for synthetic benchmarks.

Finally, there’s the outright deception:The lab data advertised online collapses under real-world conditions.

The uncomfortable truth

There are two reasons for the obsession with extreme scalability:

1. You need awesome-sounding technology to justify your $100 million funding round

2. You desperately want your blockchain to stand out in a market with 5,000+ other options

User demand is an afterthought. The real game is to convince retail investors that you are the ultimate goal — to get venture capitalists as your loudest influencers, supporting your TPS narrative.

Build Something Meaningful

If you really build something in this space, here is your reality check:

1. Design an economic model that doesn’t require new buyers to join every month

2. Create an interface that doesn’t make the average person want to smash their laptop

3. Build to scale for your actual use case needs, not to sound awesome on a PowerPoint slide

Reality Check on Scalability

The next time a project brags about being able to handle 500,000 TPS, ask yourself: “What are these transactions actually doing? Who is generating them? And for what purpose?”

When they start making vague references to “future applications” and “Web3 social”, you’ll know the answer.

Real innovation isn't about theoretical performance. It's about building something people actually need, and building it at a scale that's appropriate for that need.

Everything else is just expensive performance art masquerading as technology.