For years, Visa’s alleged 24,000 transactions per second (TPS) has been the gold standard for measuring blockchain scalability. New blockchains routinely claim to “beat Visa,” fueling hype and investment. However, this number is largely a myth: Visa’s real-world average throughput is around 1,700 TPS, and most blockchains’ performance claims are similarly inflated.
The Visa 24k TPS Fallacy
According to Visa’s own documentation, its theoretical peak capacity is 56,000 TPS, but actual traffic rarely exceeds 1,700 TPS. The 24,000 TPS figure originates from idealized lab conditions and has been uncritically repeated in crypto debates since 2010. Even during holiday shopping peaks, Visa’s network handles around 8,000 TPS—far from 24,000. This misrepresentation has been used to belittle Bitcoin’s 7 TPS, ignoring that Bitcoin prioritizes decentralization over raw speed.
Exaggerated Blockchain Benchmarks
Many blockchains (e.g., EOS, NEO, IOTA) boast high TPS in testnet environments but struggle in production. EOS’s theoretical 4,000+ TPS typically drops to a few hundred on mainnet due to latency and limited validator nodes. IOTA, despite claiming infinite scalability, remains dependent on a centralized Coordinator to prevent spam—a clear violation of decentralization. Hashgraph’s team has threatened to sue anyone forking the code, making it legally centralized rather than permissionless. These examples show that high TPS often comes at the cost of censorship resistance.
The Decentralization-Speed Trade-off
The blockchain trilemma states that security, decentralization, and scalability cannot all be maximized simultaneously. EOS achieves high throughput with only 21 supernodes, creating risks of collusion and governance capture. Bitcoin sticks to ~7 TPS to maintain thousands of independent nodes worldwide. Layer 2 solutions (Lightning Network) and sharding offer hope for scaling without sacrificing decentralization, but these technologies are still maturing and not yet suitable for global payment volumes.
How to Evaluate TPS Claims
Investors and developers should look beyond whitepaper numbers and examine real-world mainnet data, node distribution, and the trade-offs involved. A blockchain that claims 10,000 TPS but has only 10 validators is not a true decentralized network. Visa’s myth teaches us that performance figures divorced from operational reality can be deeply misleading. The true value of blockchain lies not in speed alone, but in trustless, permissionless consensus.