Crypto: Why Blockchain Tps Numbers Often Collapse In The Real World 2026

High TPS figures promise scale, but every additional transaction increases the burden on the very nodes meant to keep networks decentralized.

Blockchain transactions per second (TPS) numbers are often treated as a performance gauge, but they don’t tell the full story of whether a network can scale in practice.

Carter Feldman, founder of Psy Protocol and a former hacker, told Cointelegraph that TPS figures are often misleading because they ignore how transactions are actually verified and relayed across decentralized systems.

“Many pre-mainnet, testnet or isolated benchmarking tests measure TPS with only one node running. At that point, you might as well call Instagram a blockchain that can hit 1 billion TPS because it has one central authority validating every API call,” Feldman said.

Part of the issue is how most blockchains are designed. The faster they try to go, the heavier the load on every node and the harder decentralization becomes. That burden can be reduced by separating transaction execution from verification.

TPS is a valid benchmark for blockchain performance. If a network has higher TPS, it can handle more real usage.

But Feldman argued most headline TPS figures represent ideal settings that don’t translate to real-world throughput. The impressive numbers don’t show how the system performs under decentralized conditions.

“The TPS of a virtual machine or a single node is not a measure of a blockchain’s real mainnet performance,” said Feldman.

Every full node in a blockchain must check that transactions follow the protocol’s rules. If one node accepts an invalid transaction, others should reject it. That’s what makes a decentralized ledger work.

Related: Firedancer will speed up Solana, but it won’t reach full potential

Source: CoinTelegraph