LIMITATIONS OF SCALING BLOCKCHAINS AND WHICH VMS ARE THEORETICALLY THE FASTEST

Summary from the TLDR Crypto newsletter

The Sonic (formerly Fantom) team discovered that database optimization yielded an 800% performance increase, while parallel transaction execution only provided a 30% improvement even under perfect theoretical conditions. The findings challenge common assumptions about blockchain scaling, revealing that single high-throughput servers (like Solana and Megaeth) can achieve superior performance compared to multi-server consensus systems. Sonic deliberately optimizes for mesh networks to facilitate intercommunicating programs, and the research concludes by suggesting that traditional performance assumptions about blockchain scaling methods may need reassessment.