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.
