Can Proof-of-Work Blockchains Achieve 100,000+ TPS? Learning from Monad and MegaETH
The blockchain world has been captivated by recent breakthroughs in transaction throughput, with projects like Monad claiming 10,000 TPS and MegaETH promising over 100,000 TPS. But here's the million-dollar question: can traditional Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains achieve similar performance levels? The answer might surprise you—and it involves some ingenious architectural innovations that challenge our assumptions about what PoW can accomplish.
The Speed Demons: What Monad and MegaETH Actually Do
Before diving into PoW solutions, let's understand what we're trying to match. These high-performance blockchains didn't just stumble upon their impressive numbers—they engineered sophisticated systems that rethink fundamental blockchain architecture.
Monad's Multi-Pronged Approach
Monad achieves its impressive 10,000 TPS through a combination of innovations that work in harmony:
MonadBFT Consensus serves as the foundation, using a Byzantine Fault Tolerant mechanism derived from HotStuff. This isn't just another consensus algorithm—it's optimized for linear communication under normal conditions and achieves 1-second block times with single-slot finality. The key innovation is pipelined proposals that eliminate idle time, keeping the network constantly productive.
Parallel and Asynchronous Execution decouples transaction execution from consensus. Transactions execute in parallel before completion, with results committed in order and checked against the current state. This eliminates Ethereum's redundancy and targets 1 billion gas per second—enough for 10,000 TPS assuming 100k gas per transaction.
MonadDb, their custom state database, stores most state on SSD instead of RAM, dramatically reducing hardware requirements while enabling consumer-grade nodes to participate, enhancing decentralization without sacrificing performance.
MegaETH's Specialization Strategy
MegaETH takes a different approach, aiming for over 100,000 TPS through radical specialization:
Node Specialization assigns different roles to different node types: sequencer nodes execute and order transactions, replica nodes apply results, prover nodes generate proofs, and full nodes re-execute for verification. This division of labor optimizes resource use and reduces hardware demands for lighter nodes.
Hyper-Optimized EVM achieves high transaction throughput through redesigned trie structures and in-memory computing (up to 4TB RAM), abundant compute capacity with JIT compilation, and millisecond-level response time through two-pronged parallel execution. Their custom P2P protocol compresses state diffs by 19x, dramatically enhancing efficiency.
Mini Blocks are produced up to 100 times per second for instant confirmation, later included in slower EVM blocks for final settlement on Ethereum. This ensures both speed and security, with their testnet achieving 20,000 TPS and mainnet targeting over 100,000 TPS with 10ms block times.
The PoW Challenge: Why Traditional Approaches Fall Short
Proof-of-Work faces inherent limitations that make high TPS challenging. Bitcoin's 10-minute block times yield roughly 7 TPS, while Ethereum's historical 15-second block times managed 15-30 TPS. These limitations stem from fundamental PoW characteristics:
Sequential Block Mining requires miners to find valid hashes sequentially, creating bottlenecks that prevent rapid transaction processing. Unlike consensus mechanisms that can process multiple transactions simultaneously, PoW's mining process inherently serializes block production.
Propagation Delays become critical at high speeds. Shortening block times to one second increases fork probability, compromising security as blocks must propagate across the network quickly. Current internet infrastructure struggles with sub-second propagation for large blocks containing thousands of transactions.
Centralization Risks emerge when block sizes increase to handle more transactions. Only nodes with sufficient bandwidth and storage can participate, potentially reducing decentralization—one of PoW's core value propositions.
The Multi-Chain Revolution: Kadena's Breakthrough
The most promising approach to high-TPS PoW comes from an unexpected direction: instead of optimizing single chains, why not run multiple chains in parallel?
Kadena pioneered this approach with their "braided chain" architecture, achieving remarkable results that challenge conventional PoW limitations. Their system operates multiple PoW chains simultaneously, interlinked for security, creating what amounts to a PoW-based parallel processing system.
The numbers are impressive: Kadena has achieved 480,000 TPS with 20 chains, verified by Gauntlet Networks, with plans for 50 chains that could exceed 1 million TPS. Each chain contributes its TPS to the total, distributing transaction load for scalability while maintaining PoW's security guarantees.
What makes this approach particularly elegant is how the braided chains reference each other, enhancing security rather than compromising it. An attacker would need to compromise multiple chains simultaneously, with difficulty growing exponentially as more chains are added. This creates a security model that actually improves with scale—a rare achievement in blockchain architecture.
Perhaps most surprisingly, Kadena claims energy efficiency remains constant as chains are added, addressing one of PoW's primary criticisms. The Chainweb protocol achieves this by distributing work across chains without duplicating effort, maintaining PoW's security benefits while scaling performance.
The DAG Alternative: Theoretical Promise, Practical Challenges
Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structures represent another theoretical path to high-TPS PoW, allowing simultaneous transaction confirmations without traditional blocks. This approach could theoretically handle massive transaction volumes by eliminating block time constraints entirely.
Research papers have explored models like blockDAG for scaling PoW throughput, with DAGs allowing multiple transactions to be confirmed concurrently. IOTA's original Tangle used PoW for each transaction, theoretically enabling high TPS, though the project has since moved to different consensus mechanisms.
However, DAG-based PoW systems remain largely experimental. Security-performance trade-offs are complex and not fully understood, with practical implementations limited. Most DAG-based systems like Nano and current IOTA use Proof-of-Stake or other mechanisms, suggesting the theoretical promise hasn't translated to practical success.
Single-Chain Optimizations: Fighting an Uphill Battle
Traditional approaches to scaling single-chain PoW face significant challenges that make 100,000+ TPS extremely difficult to achieve. While optimizations are possible, they typically involve dangerous trade-offs.
Shorter block times and larger blocks could theoretically increase TPS, but risk creating frequent forks and promoting centralization. Bitcoin Cash's experiment with larger blocks illustrated these challenges, with increased centralization concerns and ongoing debates about sustainable scaling.
Advanced networking optimizations, similar to MegaETH's state diff compression, could help with propagation delays but would likely be insufficient alone. PoW's sequential nature creates fundamental bottlenecks that networking improvements alone cannot overcome.
Execution layer optimizations like parallel execution within blocks and custom state databases could enhance throughput, but PoW's consensus mechanism remains the primary limiter for achieving ultra-high TPS.
Comparative Analysis: Evaluating the Options
| Approach | TPS Achieved | Feasibility | Security Impact | Decentralization Impact | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Multi-Chain PoW (Kadena) | Up to 480,000 | High (proven) | Enhanced by braided chains | Maintains with low hardware needs | Practical, scalable, energy efficiency improves with more chains |
| DAG-Based PoW | Theoretical, high | Low (research) | Trade-offs analyzed, potential risks | May require centralization for bootstrap | Experimental, needs further implementation |
| Single-Chain Optimizations | Limited, <10k | Low (challenging) | Risks forks, 51% attacks | High risk of centralization | Faces propagation and security issues at high TPS |
The Parallel Processing Paradigm
What's fascinating about Kadena's approach is how it mirrors concepts from Monad and MegaETH while maintaining PoW's fundamental security properties. Like Monad's parallel execution, Kadena processes transactions across multiple chains simultaneously. Like MegaETH's specialization, different chains can handle different types of transactions or applications.
This parallel processing paradigm suggests that the future of high-TPS PoW isn't about making individual chains faster, but about orchestrating multiple chains to work together efficiently. It's a fundamental shift from optimization to architecture—from trying to squeeze more performance out of existing designs to reimagining how blockchain networks can be structured.
Looking Forward: The Multi-Chain Future
The evidence strongly suggests that multi-chain PoW architectures represent the most viable path to achieving TPS levels comparable to cutting-edge projects like Monad and MegaETH. This approach offers several compelling advantages:
Proven scalability with real-world results demonstrating 480,000+ TPS Enhanced security through inter-chain referencing and distributed attack resistance Maintained decentralization with reasonable hardware requirements Energy efficiency that improves rather than degrades with scale
As the blockchain industry continues evolving toward higher performance requirements, the multi-chain PoW model pioneered by Kadena may prove to be more than just an interesting experiment—it could be the foundation for the next generation of high-performance, secure, and decentralized blockchain networks.
Conclusion: Redefining What's Possible with PoW
The question of whether PoW can achieve 100,000+ TPS has a nuanced answer. Traditional single-chain PoW faces fundamental limitations that make such performance extremely challenging. However, innovative multi-chain architectures demonstrate that PoW can indeed compete with the highest-performing blockchain systems when approached with architectural creativity rather than brute-force optimization.
Kadena's success with braided chains proves that the blockchain trilemma—balancing security, scalability, and decentralization—can be addressed through thoughtful system design rather than compromising core principles. As projects like Monad and MegaETH push the boundaries of what's possible with consensus mechanisms, PoW need not be left behind.
The future of high-performance PoW lies not in abandoning its fundamental principles, but in reimagining how those principles can be applied at scale. Multi-chain architectures represent a mature, proven approach that maintains PoW's security guarantees while achieving the transaction throughput necessary for mainstream blockchain adoption.
In a world where speed often comes at the cost of security or decentralization, Kadena's approach suggests we might not have to choose. That's a future worth building toward.