"The myth of high TPS — and why it actually matters"
For a long time, I believed that higher TPS meant a better blockchain.
It sounded logical: more transactions per second should mean faster payments, smoother trading, and better user experience. But after spending time in DeFi and reading how Fogo approaches performance, I realized something uncomfortable:
TPS measures capacity, not quality.
A network can process thousands of transactions per second and still suffer from front-running, gas priority wars, slippage, and unpredictable execution. And that’s exactly what we see across the industry.
High TPS often hides a deeper issue: transactions are still competing against each other in a chaotic ordering system. The result is not efficiency, but faster competition.
What actually matters is how transactions are ordered, how fairly they are executed, and how predictable the outcome is for the user.
That’s why the TPS narrative can be misleading. It makes us focus on a laboratory metric while ignoring real trading conditions.
Understanding this changed how I evaluate blockchains. I stopped asking, “How many TPS?” and started asking, “How does the system behave when real users interact with it?”
And that’s where the difference becomes visible.