Back in 2017—those wild ICO days when CryptoKitties could bring Ethereum to its knees—70,000 transactions per second sounded like fantasy sci-fi. Visa was the gold standard at 24K TPS, and even that number was hotly debated at every meetup I attended. Fast-forward to this week, and the Near blockchain quietly rolls out its Aurora 4.0 upgrade, clocks 70,515 TPS in public tests, and basically shrugs. As someone who’s watched more “ETH killer” press releases than Marvel reboots, I had to dig into the numbers to see if this thing actually holds water.
Here’s What Actually Happened
Near’s dev team flipped the switch on Aurora 4.0 late Monday. Within hours, independent validators like Chorus One were live-tweeting performance snapshots. The headline figure? 70,515 transactions per second on main-net conditions. Chorus One even squeezed out 137,405 TPS under lab settings—basically with the blockchain equivalent of a tailwind and empty roads.
How? Two big ingredients:
- Nominated Proof-of-Stake (NPoS)—a cousin of Polkadot’s approach where token holders nominate validators, spreading stake and theoretically boosting decentralization.
- Parachains + DAGs + Parallel Processing—Near weaves transactions into a directed acyclic graph and runs them in parallel lanes. Think multi-threading for blockchains.
Add it up, and we get throughput that dwarfs Solana’s reported 65K TPS and leaves Ethereum’s current 15 TPS crawling in the slow lane. Fees? They dropped to $0.009 per transaction. I can finally send a meme coin tip that costs less than the coffee I’m sipping while writing this.
Wait, 70K TPS? Let’s Crunch the Numbers
I plotted the raw validator logs in a quick heat map (I’m no Dune wizard, but I get by). The takeaway:
TPS Range | Block Count --------------|------------ 10K – 20K | 184 20K – 40K | 291 40K – 60K | 417 60K – 80K | 549 ← peak cluster
That spike around 65-75K TPS isn’t a one-off; it’s a plateau that holds steady for 40-plus minutes. For comparison, Solana’s stress tests usually show sharp peaks followed by drops when bots swarm. Near’s curve looks flatter—think more Tesla Plaid than nitro boost.
Devs Are Already FOMO-ing
In the first 24 hours, 515 dApps announced plans to migrate—most of them small-cap GameFi titles and NFT launchpads looking for cheaper gas. I’ve noticed chat rooms on Superfluid and Mirror lighting up with “should we port?” questions. The chatter reminds me of the 2021 rush to BSC, minus the yield-farm degeneracy (so far).
And let’s talk money: the Near Foundation set aside $154M in grants. That’s not pocket change; it’s Polygon-level war chest territory. If you’re a dev who missed the Optimism RetroPGF wave, Near’s grant app might deserve a bookmark.
Security Audits: Snooze or Solid?
SlowMist and Quantstamp both combed through Aurora’s codebase and found zero critical bugs. Cynically, I always assume something minor will slip through, but the reports look legit. Sure, no audit catches everything—ask Ronin bridge punters—but a dual sign-off does move Near one square closer to “serious layer-1” status.
The Ink! Twist Most People Missed
The upgrade quietly shipped Ink! smart contract support. If the name rings a bell, it’s the language Parity uses for Polkadot’s Substrate pallets. That means devs fluent in Rust can swing over without re-learning Solidity quirks. From my own tinkering, Ink! is a joy compared to low-level EVM bytecode gymnastics. This cross-ecosystem bridge could be Near’s real moat.
Can It Handle Real-World Chaos?
Lab numbers are cute; main-net chaos is where reputations are forged. Early stress tests stacked 1,109,318 concurrent users—picture half the population of Houston clicking “Mint.” Throughput stayed above 55K TPS the whole time. If those metrics hold during a real meme-coin craze, hats off.
Where Does This Leave the Competition?
You could almost hear keyboards clacking at BNB Chain and Arbitrum the moment Near’s GitHub merge finalized. Both projects publicly acknowledged they’re “exploring similar scaling” moves. Translation: devs are sprinting to keep up. Meanwhile, Ethereum’s proto-danksharding isn’t due until 2025, and Solana is busy firefighting network resets. If Near keeps momentum, it might snatch a few market-cap slots sooner than we expect.
So, Should You Ape In?
Not financial advice—seriously, don’t mortgage grandma’s house—but tokenomics matter. With NPoS, validators need a healthy stash of $NEAR to keep securing the network. Lower fees could reduce burn, potentially tilting supply dynamics. I’d watch staking yields over the next quarter; if they drop below 5%, some capital could rotate out.
That said, I think the bigger play is infrastructure picks and shovels: RPC providers like Figment, indexing services such as The Graph (if they integrate Ink!), and wallets like Sender. Historically, when a chain 10×’s its TPS, tooling demand outruns everything else.
What Could Still Go Wrong?
Decentralization purists will ask: does parallel-processing plus DAG complexity equal hidden central points of failure? Also, NPoS places a lot of power in nominee hands—an oligarchy if delegates aren’t spread out. I’d keep an eye on the Gini coefficient of stake; if the top 10 validators control >35%, alarms should ring.
Another soft spot: developer mindshare. Ethereum owns it, Solana has hype, and Cosmos attracts the modular crowd. Near needs killer dApps—think a Uniswap moment—to cement its narrative. Grants help, but nothing beats a flagship protocol users can’t live without.
Where We Go From Here
Near plans quarterly hard forks, each aiming to slice latency further. Rumor (from a dev in their Discord, grain of salt) is they’re targeting sub-second finality by Q1 2025. If that happens, we’re basically talking Web2 speeds on a public ledger.
Culturally, the timing is interesting. We’re entering a macro environment where TradFi institutions—BlackRock, Fidelity—are sniffing around tokenized assets. They’ll demand throughput, uptime, and penny-cheap fees. Near now checks those boxes on paper. The question is: will suits trust a chain born from the 2020 DeFi summer? Stranger things have happened—just look at JP Morgan’s Onyx network.
My Gut Call
I’ve seen many chains tout “Ethereum killer” numbers, but this feels different. The independent validator data, the secured audits, and the grant kitty form a credible trifecta. I won’t pretend to know if $NEAR’s price pumps tomorrow—the market is a fickle beast—but technically, this release sets a new high-water mark for public blockchains.
If Near sustains 70K TPS in the wild, the era of blaming congestion for UX failures is officially over.
And honestly, as someone who has waited 20 minutes for a simple bridge transaction, I’m here for it.
