What is the transactions per second (TPS) rate for Zenon Network?

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What is the transactions per second (TPS) rate for the ZNN network?

1 Answers

Currently, there is an artifical hardcoded limit of 100 transactions per momentum. Since a momentum is scheduled to be produced every 10 seconds, this puts the TPS at a maximum of 10.

This is further reduced by a few factors.
The first is that not every scheduled momentum gets produced by its assigned pillar. The second is that Zenon utilizes a Block-Lattice structure where every "send" transaction needs to be explicitly acknowledged with a "receive" transaction. This effectively cuts the TPS in half when making a comparison with other networks. In any case, it's about the same order magnitude as both Bitcoin and Ethereum.

This artificial hardcoded limit is a short term placeholder until the community develops a more robust transaction prioritization mechanism, often referred to as "Dynamic Plasma". Although a better transaction prioritization scheme is not stricly needed to lift the hard cap, it will help ensure that the additional throughput is used efficiently.

For the longer term, the founding developers have shared some ideas on network architecture for how the community can improve throughput. In particular, the Narwhal and Tusk paper describes TPS in the hundreds of thousands.

As a general principle though, the more throughput a network has the more demanding and resource intensive it is on the nodes which comprise the network. This trade-off is captured in the concept of the blockchain trilemna where protocol developers must sacrifice one of: decentralization, security, or scalability.

What this means is that even if we are able to acheive high theoretical TPS, we may decide to impose a limit for the sake of decentralization. Decisions and disagreements on what these limits should be have formed the basis for network forks such as BTC vs BCH.

Another important consideration when it comes to understanding network throughput is the concept of layered scaling. Examples include Lightning Network for Bitcoin, and Optimism for Ethereum. As innovation continues, it's likely that Layer 2s and beyond become more efficient, more trustless, and possibly indistinguisable from their base layers. When comparing throughput, it then becomes necessary to compare the throughput of entire layered systems rather than only their base layers.