Original title: The Great TPS Lie: Cryptos Obsession With Solving Problems Nobody Has
Original author: @therosieum, @tenprotocol member
Original translation: Rhythm Little Deep
Editors note: The article criticizes the crypto industrys blind pursuit of high TPS (transactions per second), arguing that this competition is false propaganda that ignores real user needs. In order to attract financing and attention, project parties exaggerate laboratory data, but sacrifice decentralization, security and practicality, and often solve problems that no one cares about. The author calls for focusing on truly meaningful blockchain applications and building them at the scale of actual use cases rather than chasing flashy numbers.
The following is the original content (for easier reading and understanding, the original content has been reorganized):
Every other week, a new L1 or L2 project comes online, claiming: “We can process 100,000 transactions per second!”
Sometimes its 50,000, sometimes its 1 million.
The exact numbers don’t really matter, because they’re pretty much bullshit.
The transaction speed competition
The scalability war has degenerated into the most embarrassing battle in the crypto world. Each new protocol must claim to have a higher TPS than the previous one, regardless of whether those speeds are:
Is actually possible outside of their AWS testnet (spoiler alert: it’s almost impossible)
Meaningful for real-world applications
It is necessary for actual human use scenarios
This obsession with throughput is the crypto world’s version of driving a Lamborghini during rush hour. The problem isn’t the specs, it’s the context.
Let’s talk about real data
Visa, the payments giant that processes transactions for billions of people around the world, processes about 1,700 transactions per second on average. Their theoretical maximum is about 24,000 TPS, but they have 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 emoticons than on-chain transactions, you might be solving an imaginary problem.
The hidden costs of pursuing “monopoly” scalability
Obsession with theoretical throughput can lead to real problems that hurt users.
First, it is disguised centralization: in pursuit of high TPS, decentralization is often sacrificed just for a marketing number.
Second, it’s the security show: cutting corners in the rush to expand and planting loopholes that will be exploited sooner or later.
Third, there’s the engineering brain drain: top talent isn’t building what users actually need, but is instead stuck optimizing synthetic benchmarks.
Finally, it is blatant deception: the laboratory numbers promoted on the Internet are vulnerable under real-life conditions.
The uncomfortable truth
There are two reasons for the obsession with extreme scalability:
You need awesome-sounding technology to justify your $100 million round
You are desperately trying to make your chain stand out in a market of more than 5,000 blockchains
User demand is just an afterthought. The real trick is to convince retail investors that you are the ultimate solution — and VCs serve as the most vocal KOLs for your TPS narrative.
Build something truly meaningful
If you really build something in this space, here’s some cold water for you:
Focus on doing things that only blockchain can achieve
Design an economic model that does not require new investors to enter the market every month
Create an interface that doesn’t make ordinary people want to smash their computers
Build to scale for real use cases, not for roadshow slides
A reality check for scalability
Next time a project brags about being able to handle 500,000 TPS, ask them: “What are these transactions actually doing? Who is generating them? And for what purpose?”
When they hem and haw about “future adoption” and “web3 social,” you know the answer.
Real innovation isn’t about theoretical performance in a vacuum, it’s about building things people actually need, at the right scale for that need.
Everything else is just expensive performance art masquerading as technology.
