Key Notes
- NEAR’s benchmark used 70 shards on Google Cloud hardware costing approximately $900 monthly to achieve the milestone.
- The test involved only native token transfers, not smart contracts, suggesting real-world capacity may differ from peak performance.
- NEAR currently operates nine shards on mainnet, positioning it among the highest theoretical capacity layer-one blockchains.
NEAR Protocol
NEAR
$1.75
24h volatility:
0.7%
Market cap:
$2.24 B
Vol. 24h:
$189.49 M
has achieved a significant milestone of 1 million transactions per second (TPS) in a benchmark test environment created to simulate a real-world scenario. This development helps to demonstrate sharding is an efficient method for high scalability and throughput capacity for high-performance blockchains—surpassing Visa’s peak capacity of around 65,000 transactions per second.
The NEAR Foundation reported this recent achievement in a blog post on Dec. 8, explaining the benchmark’s methodology in “a publicly verifiable benchmark using real code, realistic workloads, and cost-effective and performant Google Compute Engine C4D machines across 70 shards,” as described.
Results are available in three Grafana dashboards that achieved 1,029,497, 1,037,334, and 1,037,495 transactions per second peaks, followed by a constant one million TPS performance for nearly one hour each.
Grafana dashboards for three NEAR Protocol 1M-TPS tests | Source: NEAR Foundation/Grafana
As described in the blog post, this benchmark had validators split in 70 shards, running commercial-grade hardware from Google Cloud, with an approximate cost of $900 per month. While accessible, this cost is significantly higher than the minimum required to run chunk validators on NEAR—currently estimated at $15 per month, according to Meta Pool’s Node Studio.
This test used only native token transfers, not broadcasting smart contract executions that require more network gas and computational power, which could reduce the overall capacity per second. Moreover, the NEAR blockchain currently has nine shards and not the 70 shards used for the tests, meaning the current mainnet capacity is likely orders of magnitude below the achieved one million transactions per second.
Nevertheless, it suggests NEAR Protocol is ready, with enough optimizations, to scale at any moment to something close to 1 million TPS with consistency and network reliability as adoptions and demand for block space grows.
How Many TPS Other Blockchains and Payment Processors Can Achieve?
Interestingly, Visa (NYSE: V) can scale to 65,000 transactions per second, according to The Banking Scene. In 2024, Visa processed an average of approximately 25,091 transactions per second globally, based on the total of roughly 293 billion payment transactions handled that year.
Data Coinspeaker gathered from Chainspect on Dec. 8 shows the theoretical maximum TPS other blockchains can achieve, based on benchmark tests like the one provided by NEAR, or rough calculations by the Chainspect analysts.
“Taking the block size measured in gas/bytes/computational units and dividing it by the size of the smallest transaction possible to determine the maximum number of transactions that fit into the block (in most blockchains, the smallest transaction is a transfer of a native token). Then the number of transactions is divided by the block time to compute the metric,” the team explained.
When comparing with some of the largest cryptocurrencies by market cap, Sonic, ICP, and Aptos have the largest maximum theoretical TPS after NEAR, with nearly 400,000, 210,000, and 160,000 transactions per second, respectively.
Sui
SUI
$1.61
24h volatility:
1.5%
Market cap:
$5.99 B
Vol. 24h:
$992.57 M
, TON
TON
$1.62
24h volatility:
1.3%
Market cap:
$3.97 B
Vol. 24h:
$136.84 M
, Polkadot
DOT
$2.13
24h volatility:
0.6%
Market cap:
$3.49 B
Vol. 24h:
$188.53 M
, and Solana
SOL
$134.0
24h volatility:
1.2%
Market cap:
$75.10 B
Vol. 24h:
$5.31 B
follow suit, with approximately 120,000, 105,000, 100,000, and 65,000 TPS, respectively. However, SOL is the one with the highest “Real-Time TPS” across all blockchains on Chainspect—at 1,238 transactions per second by the time of this writing.
Fastest blockchains by transactions per second (TPS), as of Dec. 8 | Source: Coinspect
Therefore, this recent achievement positions NEAR as one of the layer-one blockchain networks with the highest theoretical capacity and scalability. This adds up to recent positive developments in the NEAR ecosystem, as Coinspeaker has covered and reported about.
On Dec. 5, NEAR launched TravAI, together with ADI Chain, where AI agents handle complete travel booking workflows from search to payment using crypto. On Dec. 3, the foundation announced NEAR AI Cloud and Private Chat, two related products that were already integrated by relevant players like the Brave Browser. Kalshi also recently added support to NEAR’s native token and NEAR Intents surpassed the $7 billion mark for its chain-abstracted swaps all-time volume.
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Disclaimer: Coinspeaker is committed to providing unbiased and transparent reporting. This article aims to deliver accurate and timely information but should not be taken as financial or investment advice. Since market conditions can change rapidly, we encourage you to verify information on your own and consult with a professional before making any decisions based on this content.
Vini Barbosa has covered the crypto industry professionally since 2020, summing up to over 10,000 hours of research, writing, and editing related content for media outlets and key industry players. Vini is an active commentator and a heavy user of the technology, truly believing in its revolutionary potential. Topics of interest include blockchain, open-source software, decentralized finance, and real-world utility.
Vini Barbosa on X
Source: https://www.coinspeaker.com/near-protocol-1-million-tps-benchmark-test/