Blockchain Developers Tackle Bottleneck Problem to Enhance Network Resilience

For over a decade, blockchain developers have prioritized speed as the primary metric of performance, with transactions per second (TPS) serving as the industry’s benchmark. However, high-TPS blockchains have often faltered during periods of real-world demand, revealing a structural weakness known as the bottleneck problem. This issue arises when blockchains prioritize throughput without adequately addressing systemic friction, leading to technical constraints that emerge under heavy load.

The bottleneck problem manifests in several ways. At the validator and node level, high TPS requires significant hardware resources, which not all nodes can sustain. This leads to delays in block propagation or nodes dropping out, fragmenting consensus and slowing the network. During high-traffic periods, mempools flood with activity, and sophisticated users and bots engage in front-running strategies, pushing out legitimate transactions and deteriorating user experience. Propagation delays also cause uneven message sharing, leading to temporary forks and wasted computation. Additionally, high-frequency block creation stresses consensus algorithms, increasing the risk of validator misalignment and slashing errors. Storage inefficiencies further exacerbate the problem, as transaction volumes grow and ledger size increases, consolidating control in the hands of those who can afford high-performance infrastructure.

To address these challenges, the industry has developed engineering solutions. Local fee markets segment demand and reduce pressure on global mempools. Anti-front-running tools, such as MEV protection layers and spam filters, shield users from manipulative behaviors. New propagation techniques, like Solana’s Turbine protocol, reduce message latency. Modular consensus layers distribute decision-making more efficiently, and storage solutions like snapshotting, pruning, and parallel disk writes maintain high speed without compromising size or stability. These advances not only improve technical performance but also disincentivize market manipulation, lowering volatility and increasing investor confidence.

Many first-generation high-speed blockchains were built without accounting for these interlocking constraints, leading to quick fixes that did not address the foundational architecture. In contrast, today’s leading platforms are designing systems where speed is a byproduct of efficiency, building with these lessons in mind from the start. The future of blockchain does not belong to the fastest but to those who can maintain resilience under pressure, becoming a full-fledged analogue of the web2 payment system. Those who address the bottleneck problem early will define the standard for performance in the next era of web3.