Throughput is becoming a baseline feature for blockchains. The harder question now is whether they can meet the maturity standards financial institutions expect from trading infrastructure.
The argument comes from an article written by a16z Crypto, translated by Luffy and published by Foresight News. It says finance remains one of blockchain’s clearest application areas, but also one of its most demanding. Blockchains are often described as shared systems that place assets, ownership records, and execution rules inside a framework not controlled by a single counterparty. That does not mean they are automatically ready for the scale and constraints of global financial markets.
For years, debates around blockchain adoption focused on cost and throughput, or how many transactions a public chain could process per second. Without enough performance headroom, financial applications could not scale. Now that throughput gaps across many commercial systems are narrowing, the center of the discussion is shifting.
As financial institutions begin executing trades onchain and issuing stablecoins and tokenized assets, they need to know whether these networks can satisfy real market demands. The article highlights several requirements: stable and reliable access, predictable execution rules, and control over when sensitive information becomes public. Those protections must keep working even during congestion, outages, or attacks.
a16z Crypto says developers have spent years working on these problems. The key issue is no longer throughput alone, but how much closer blockchains are to supporting financial markets in practice.
Predictability is becoming the central requirement
The article says raw performance was long the most visible bottleneck. Limited transaction capacity, repeated congestion, and high fees made many real financial use cases difficult to support. When market activity rose, routine actions such as placing or canceling orders could become expensive or unreliable.
That constraint has eased over the past few years, especially after the last infrastructure upgrade cycle. According to the article, total blockchain throughput has risen sharply over the past 5 years, and some commercial networks can now process tens of thousands of transactions per second. Even so, that is only a starting point. Stress testing and new architectural designs are still pushing those figures higher.
But throughput does not answer a more important question: when, exactly, will a transaction be included onchain? The article frames that as a problem of execution predictability.
In financial settings, transactions need to be confirmed within defined time windows and under rules known in advance. Many actions have value only within narrow timing windows. A 1-second delay may not matter much in daily payments. In trading markets, milliseconds can shape whether participants trust the infrastructure at all.
The article uses onchain order books as an example. If a trader’s cancellation request is confirmed too late, another participant can trade against a stale price. Market makers will price that risk into their quotes, widening spreads and leaving all traders with worse execution.
In the article’s framework, predictability needs two layers of protection: transaction admission, which includes censorship resistance, and transaction ordering.
Resilience starts with dependable transaction access
Even if ordering rules are well designed, risk remains if one party still controls execution access. The article compares that situation to the New York Stock Exchange being run each second by a random staked node that decides which orders get in. In that setup, the node would have significant power over market participants.
Ordering determines where a transaction sits relative to other orders after it reaches the chain. Resilience addresses the earlier step: whether participants can submit orders successfully without relying on a single gatekeeper or operator. That decision can affect pricing, trading risk, and the final result.
For that reason, blockchain developers are trying to build stronger deterministic guarantees, with a focus on immediate confirmation rather than eventual confirmation. The standard described in the article is stricter than saying a transaction will be confirmed eventually. The goal is that a compliant transaction that reaches the network on time should be included right away.
a16z Crypto researchers introduced what the article calls “strong chain quality” as a concept and measurement standard. Its purpose is to stop the next round of execution rights from being monopolized by a single operator’s queue. The underlying idea is that blockchains can reserve part of each block for transactions submitted by other network nodes, giving compliant transactions multiple paths into the chain and reducing one operator’s control over inclusion order.
The article says the goal is to make block space a form of public infrastructure with several access routes rather than a single queue. That would require more complex protocol logic than many commercial systems use today. In the author’s view, the benefit justifies the research effort. Even under market stress, participants could have greater confidence that their trades will go through.
Ordering rules need to be clear before the trade happens
Predictability also depends on how a platform decides the sequence of trades. When several transactions are ready to execute, the market needs a clear ordering rule.
Most blockchains do not finalize transactions one by one. They bundle them into blocks, and a block builder or proposer writes them to the ledger. In many current systems, that actor has broad discretion over which transactions are selected and how they are arranged. The design can simplify protocol logic and may be acceptable in some cases. In financial markets, though, ordering directly affects queue priority, final execution price, and procedural fairness.
The article goes a step further. If one actor controls the right to build the next block, that actor may see transaction information before anyone else and trade on it. In crypto, that is commonly described as maximal extractable value, or MEV: extra profit captured by selecting, excluding, or reordering transactions beyond the base block reward.
The article points to sandwich attacks as the clearest example. A trader detects a pending transaction, places an order first to move the price, and then completes the reverse trade for profit. In an institutional market, the logic is even more direct: whoever controls transaction flow may be able to make trading decisions earlier than everyone else based on order information.
a16z Crypto says that weakness closely resembles existing problems in traditional finance, where centralized intermediaries can profit from privileged access to order flow and trading intent. If onchain markets cannot provide strong guarantees around ordering and execution, they risk reproducing the same asymmetries.
Protocol designers are now working on clearer ordering mechanisms. The article highlights two main approaches: deterministic rules based on priority fees and business rules defined by the trading venue itself. Specific implementations are still in the academic research stage, according to the piece, but the logic matches traditional finance. Market participants need a clear expectation of how orders will be ranked and executed, similar to the price-time priority model used by traditional exchanges.
The article adds that transaction admission and ordering must work together. If auction orders or liquidation instructions can be deliberately delayed before the ordering rule applies, fairness in ordering does not solve the problem. The reverse is also true. If users cannot predict how a transaction will be handled once it is onchain, immediate confirmation loses much of its value.
Under that framework, high throughput is only a foundation for onchain finance. Predictable admission and clear ordering rules are what make deployment possible in time-sensitive, stressed market conditions.
Privacy is about protecting trading intent before execution
The third major issue is privacy. Order information can reveal a trader’s judgment and intent. Order size and direction may show whether a fund is building a position or exiting one. If an order becomes visible before it is fully executed, other traders can use that information to move prices and profit.
The article says the issue is particularly acute onchain. Many blockchains expose pending transaction pool data before final confirmation. For financial use cases, privacy before execution is a core requirement, even if full privacy after execution is not always possible.
The argument is simple: markets can remain transparent without giving every participant a real-time view of someone else’s unfilled order.
Current protocol research is focused on protecting transaction data during the window in which it can still be used for arbitrage, while allowing different disclosure models after execution. The article gives two examples. Public markets may disclose full trade records. Interbank transactions may limit access to counterparties and regulators. A third party that cannot see every detail should still be able to verify that the trade complied with the rules from start to finish.
To get there, protocol designers are exploring several cryptographic approaches, including fully homomorphic encryption and encrypted mempools. These methods can hide transaction contents until a deadline arrives or until a committee confirms that the transaction’s position in a block has been fixed. By the time the market can see the trade, the frontrunning window has already closed.
The article says markets can preserve transparency without exposing all unfilled orders in real time. Onchain finance needs that same split logic: auditability after execution and strict protection of trade secrecy before execution.
Finance is asking for mature trading infrastructure, not just speed
The article closes with a broader point. If blockchains want to become core infrastructure for financial markets, they need to support a trading system that market participants can trust.
Throughput is only the first test. Without sufficient performance, onchain financial applications stay limited to niche settings. Now that transaction speed is becoming a baseline, the harder test is whether blockchains can satisfy financial institutions’ standards for mature trading infrastructure.
As summarized in the article, that standard includes predictable execution, unambiguous priority rules, transaction access that can withstand interference, and privacy before execution, while preserving auditable transparency after trades are completed.