Crypto's TPS Obsession: A Misguided Race Ignoring Real User Needs

According to BlockBeats, the cryptocurrency industry's focus on achieving high transactions per second (TPS) is criticized as a misleading pursuit that overlooks genuine user needs. Projects often exaggerate lab data to attract funding and attention, sacrificing decentralization, security, and practicality to solve problems that few care about. The article calls for a focus on meaningful blockchain applications built to scale according to actual use cases, rather than chasing impressive but hollow numbers. New Layer 1 or Layer 2 projects frequently claim to handle tens of thousands of transactions per second, but these figures are often unrealistic. The competition for scalability has become an embarrassing contest in the crypto world, with each new protocol claiming higher TPS than the last, regardless of whether these speeds are achievable outside of controlled environments like AWS testnets or relevant to real-world applications. Visa, a global payment giant, processes about 1,700 transactions per second on average, with a theoretical maximum of 24,000 TPS, a capacity it has never needed in decades of operation. In contrast, most blockchain projects struggle to attract even 100 daily active users. If a project's Discord emojis outnumber its on-chain transactions, it may be addressing an imaginary problem. The obsession with theoretical throughput has hidden costs. It often leads to disguised centralization, sacrificing decentralization for marketing numbers. Security is compromised as shortcuts are taken in the rush to scale, creating vulnerabilities. Talented engineers are diverted from building what users truly need to optimizing synthetic benchmarks. Moreover, the lab numbers touted in marketing often crumble under real-world conditions. This fixation on extreme scalability is driven by the need to justify massive funding and stand out in a crowded market of over 5,000 blockchains. User needs are an afterthought, with the real goal being to convince retail investors of a project's ultimate solution status, while venture capitalists amplify the TPS narrative. For those genuinely building in this space, the article advises focusing on what only blockchain can achieve, designing economic models that don't rely on constant new user acquisition, creating user-friendly interfaces, and scaling according to actual use cases rather than for impressive presentations. When a project boasts about handling hundreds of thousands of TPS, it's crucial to ask what these transactions are doing, who is generating them, and for what purpose. True innovation lies not in theoretical performance but in building what people genuinely need, scaled appropriately to demand. Anything else is merely expensive performance art disguised as technology.