48 posts tagged with "Ethereum"

While retail traders fixate on token prices, the architects of DeFi's largest protocols are quietly executing a coordinated pivot that will reshape the $149 billion sector. Aave is launching its V4 upgrade in Q1 2026 with a revolutionary hub-and-spoke architecture. Lido is allocating $60 million through GOOSE-3 to transform from "Ethereum staking middleware" into a comprehensive institutional platform. Sky (formerly MakerDAO) is deploying AI agents to automate governance decisions. These aren't incremental updates—they're a fundamental reimagining of what decentralized finance can become.

The timing isn't coincidental. Goldman Sachs reports that 71% of institutional asset managers plan to increase crypto exposure over the next 12 months, with regulatory clarity cited as the primary catalyst. As traditional finance cautiously edges toward DeFi, the protocols that dominate today are racing to meet them halfway.

On January 6, 2026, something unprecedented happened in American finance: Grayscale distributed $9.4 million in Ethereum staking rewards to ETF investors. For the first time in history, a U.S.-listed crypto exchange-traded product successfully passed on-chain staking income through to shareholders. The payout—$0.083178 per share—may seem modest, but it represents a fundamental shift in how institutional investors can access cryptocurrency yields. And it's just the opening salvo in what promises to be a fierce battle for dominance among the world's largest asset managers.

In the span of two weeks, two of Europe's largest banks announced they're offering Bitcoin trading to millions of retail customers. Belgium's KBC Group, the country's second-largest lender with $300 billion in assets, will launch crypto trading in February 2026. Germany's DZ Bank, managing over €660 billion, secured MiCA approval in January to roll out Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, and Litecoin trading through its network of cooperative banks. These aren't fintech startups or crypto-native exchanges—they're century-old institutions that once dismissed digital assets as speculative noise.

The common thread? MiCA. The European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation has become the regulatory catalyst that finally gave banks the legal clarity to enter a market they've watched from the sidelines for a decade. With over 60 European banks now offering some form of crypto service and more than 50% planning MiCA partnerships by 2026, the question is no longer whether traditional finance will embrace crypto—it's how quickly the transition will happen.

What if blockchain transactions were as instant as pressing a button in a video game? That's the audacious promise of MegaETH, the Vitalik Buterin-backed Layer 2 that's launching its mainnet and token this January 2026. With claims of 100,000+ transactions per second and 10-millisecond block times—compared to Ethereum's 15 seconds and Base's 1.78 seconds—MegaETH isn't just iterating on existing L2 technology. It's attempting to redefine what "real-time" means for blockchain.

After raising $450 million in its public sale (from $1.39 billion in total bids) and securing backing from Ethereum's co-creator himself, MegaETH has become one of the most anticipated launches of 2026. But can it deliver on promises that sound more like science fiction than blockchain engineering?

Ethereum validators currently process transactions the way a grocery store checkout works with a single lane: one item at a time, in order, no matter how long the line stretches. The Glamsterdam upgrade, scheduled for mid-2026, fundamentally changes this architecture. By introducing Block Access Lists (BAL) and enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS), Ethereum is preparing to scale from roughly 21 transactions per second to 10,000 TPS—a 476x improvement that could reshape DeFi, NFTs, and on-chain applications.

When Ethereum L2s paid $3.83 per megabyte to post data using blobs, Eclipse was paying Celestia $0.07 for the same megabyte. That's not a typo—55 times cheaper, enabling Eclipse to post over 83 GB of data without bankrupting its treasury. This cost differential isn't a temporary market anomaly. It's the structural advantage of purpose-built infrastructure.

Celestia has now processed over 160 GB of rollup data, generates daily blob fees that have grown 10x since late 2024, and commands roughly 50% market share in the data availability sector. The question isn't whether modular data availability works—it's whether Celestia can maintain its lead as EigenDA, Avail, and Ethereum's native blobs compete for the same rollup customers.

Understanding Blob Economics: The Foundation​

Before analyzing Celestia's numbers, it's worth understanding what makes data availability economically distinct from other blockchain services.

What Rollups Actually Pay For​

When a rollup processes transactions, it produces state changes that need to be verifiable. Rather than trust the rollup operator, users can verify by re-executing transactions against the original data. This requires that transaction data remains available—not forever, but long enough for challenges and verification.

Traditional rollups posted this data directly to Ethereum calldata, paying premium prices for permanent storage on the world's most secure ledger. But most rollup data only needs availability for a challenge window (typically 7-14 days), not eternity. This mismatch created the opening for specialized data availability layers.

Celestia's PayForBlob Model​

Celestia's fee model is straightforward: rollups pay per blob based on size and current gas prices. Unlike execution layers where computation costs dominate, data availability is fundamentally about bandwidth and storage—resources that scale more predictably with hardware improvements.

The economics create a flywheel: lower DA costs enable more rollups, more rollups generate more fee revenue, and increased usage justifies infrastructure investment for even greater capacity. Celestia's current throughput of approximately 1.33 MB/s (8 MB blocks every 6 seconds) represents early-stage capacity with a clear path to 100x improvement.

The 160 GB Reality: Who's Using Celestia​

The aggregate numbers tell a story of rapid adoption. Over 160 GB of data has been published to Celestia since mainnet launch, with daily data volume averaging around 2.5 GB. But the composition of this data reveals more interesting patterns.

Eclipse: The Volume Leader​

Eclipse—a Layer 2 combining Solana's virtual machine with Ethereum settlement—has published over 83 GB of data to Celestia, more than half of all network volume. Eclipse uses Celestia for data availability while settling to Ethereum, demonstrating the modular architecture in practice.

The volume isn't surprising given Eclipse's design choices. Solana Virtual Machine execution generates more data than EVM equivalents, and Eclipse's focus on high-throughput applications (gaming, DeFi, social) means transaction volumes that would be cost-prohibitive on Ethereum DA.

The Enterprise Cohort​

Beyond Eclipse, the rollup ecosystem includes:

• Manta Pacific: Over 7 GB posted, an OP Stack rollup focused on ZK applications with Universal Circuits technology
• Plume Network: RWA-specialized L2 using Celestia for tokenized asset transaction data
• Derive: On-chain options and structured products trading
• Aevo: Decentralized derivatives exchange processing high-frequency trading data
• Orderly Network: Cross-chain orderbook infrastructure

Twenty-six rollups now build on Celestia, with major frameworks—Arbitrum Orbit, OP Stack, Polygon CDK—all offering Celestia as a DA option. Rollups-as-a-Service platforms like Conduit and Caldera have made Celestia integration a standard offering.

Fee Revenue Growth​

At the end of 2024, Celestia generated approximately $225 per day in blob fees. That number has grown nearly 10x, reflecting both increased usage and the network's ability to capture value as demand rises. The fee market remains early-stage—capacity utilization is low relative to tested limits—but the growth trajectory validates the economic model.

Cost Comparison: Celestia vs. The Competition​

Data availability has become a competitive market. Understanding the cost structures helps explain rollup decisions.

Celestia vs. Ethereum Blobs​

Ethereum's EIP-4844 (Dencun upgrade) introduced blob transactions, reducing DA costs by 90%+ compared to calldata. But Celestia remains significantly cheaper:

Metric	Ethereum Blobs	Celestia
Cost per MB	~$3.83	~$0.07
Cost advantage	Baseline	55x cheaper
Capacity	Limited blob space	8 MB blocks (scaling to 1 GB)

For high-volume rollups like Eclipse, this difference is existential. At Ethereum blob prices, Eclipse's 83 GB of data would have cost over $300,000. On Celestia, it cost approximately $6,000.

Celestia vs. EigenDA​

EigenDA offers a different value proposition: Ethereum-aligned security through restaking, with claimed throughput of 100 MB/s. The tradeoffs:

Aspect	Celestia	EigenDA
Security model	Independent validator set	Ethereum restaking
Throughput	1.33 MB/s (8 MB blocks)	100 MB/s claimed
Architecture	Blockchain-based	Data Availability Committee
Decentralization	Public verification	Trust assumptions

EigenDA's DAC architecture enables higher throughput but introduces trust assumptions that fully blockchain-based solutions avoid. For teams deeply embedded in Ethereum's ecosystem, EigenDA's restaking integration may outweigh Celestia's independence.

Celestia vs. Avail​

Avail positions as the most flexible option for multichain applications:

Aspect	Celestia	Avail
Cost per MB	Higher	Lower
Economic security	Higher	Lower
Mainnet capacity	8 MB blocks	4 MB blocks
Test capacity	128 MB proven	128 MB proven

Avail's lower costs come with lower economic security—a reasonable tradeoff for applications where the marginal cost savings matter more than maximum security guarantees.

The Scaling Roadmap: From 1 MB/s to 1 GB/s​

Celestia's current capacity—approximately 1.33 MB/s—is intentionally conservative. The network has demonstrated dramatically higher throughput in controlled testing, providing a clear upgrade path.

Mammoth Testing Results​

In October 2024, the Mammoth Mini devnet achieved 88 MB blocks with 3-second block times, delivering approximately 27 MB/s throughput—over 20x current mainnet capacity.

In April 2025, the mamo-1 testnet pushed further: 128 MB blocks with 6-second block times, achieving 21.33 MB/s sustained throughput. This represented 16x current mainnet capacity while incorporating new propagation algorithms like Vacuum! designed for efficient large-block data movement.

Mainnet Upgrade Progress​

The scaling is happening incrementally:

• Ginger Upgrade (December 2024): Reduced block times from 12 seconds to 6 seconds
• 8 MB Block Increase (January 2025): Doubled block size via on-chain governance
• Matcha Upgrade (January 2026): Enabled 128 MB blocks through improved propagation mechanics, reducing node storage requirements by 77%
• Lotus Upgrade (July 2025): V4 mainnet release with further TIA holder improvements

The roadmap targets gigabyte-scale blocks by 2030, representing a 1,000x increase from current capacity. Whether market demand grows to justify this capacity remains uncertain, but the technical path is clear.

TIA Tokenomics: How Value Accrues​

Understanding Celestia's economics requires understanding TIA's role in the system.

Token Utility​

TIA serves three functions:

1. Blob fees: Rollups pay TIA for data availability
2. Staking: Validators stake TIA to secure the network and earn rewards
3. Governance: Token holders vote on network parameters and upgrades

The fee mechanism creates direct linkage between network usage and token demand. As blob submissions increase, TIA is purchased and spent, creating buy pressure proportional to network utility.

Supply Dynamics​

TIA launched with 1 billion genesis tokens. Initial inflation was set at 8% annually, decreasing over time toward 1.5% terminal inflation.

The January 2026 Matcha upgrade introduced Proof-of-Governance (PoG), slashing annual token issuance from 5% to 0.25%. This structural change:

• Reduces sell pressure from inflation
• Aligns rewards with governance participation
• Strengthens value capture as network usage grows

Additionally, the Celestia Foundation announced a $62.5 million TIA buyback program in 2025, further reducing circulating supply.

Validator Economics​

Effective January 2026, maximum validator commission increased from 10% to 20%. This addresses validators' rising operational expenses—particularly as block sizes grow—while maintaining competitive staking yields.

The Competitive Moat: First-Mover or Sustainable Advantage?​

Celestia's 50% DA market share and 160+ GB of posted data represent clear traction. But moats in infrastructure can erode quickly.

Advantages​

Framework Integration: Every major rollup framework—Arbitrum Orbit, OP Stack, Polygon CDK—supports Celestia as a DA option. This integration creates switching costs and reduces friction for new rollups.

Proven Scale: The 128 MB block testing provides confidence in future capacity that competitors haven't demonstrated at the same level.

Economic Alignment: The Proof-of-Governance tokenomics and buyback programs create stronger value capture than alternative models.

Challenges​

EigenDA's Ethereum Alignment: For teams prioritizing Ethereum-native security, EigenDA's restaking model may be more attractive despite architectural trade-offs.

Avail's Cost Advantage: For cost-sensitive applications, Avail's lower fees may outweigh security differences.

Ethereum's Native Improvement: If Ethereum expands blob capacity significantly (as proposed in various roadmap discussions), the cost differential shrinks.

The Ecosystem Lock-in Question​

Celestia's real moat may be ecosystem lock-in. Eclipse's 83+ GB of data creates path dependency—migrating to a different DA layer would require significant infrastructure changes. As more rollups accumulate history on Celestia, switching costs increase.

What the Data Tells Us​

Celestia's blob economics validate the modular thesis: specialized infrastructure for data availability can be dramatically cheaper than general-purpose L1 solutions. The 55x cost advantage over Ethereum blobs isn't magic—it's the result of purpose-built architecture optimized for a specific function.

The 160+ GB of posted data proves market demand exists. The 10x growth in fee revenue demonstrates value capture. The scaling roadmap provides confidence in future capacity.

For rollup developers, the calculus is straightforward: Celestia offers the best-tested, most integrated DA solution with a clear path to gigabyte-scale capacity. EigenDA makes sense for Ethereum-native projects willing to accept DAC trust assumptions. Avail serves multichain applications prioritizing flexibility over maximum security.

The data availability market has room for multiple winners serving different segments. But Celestia's combination of proven scale, deep integrations, and improving tokenomics positions it well for the coming wave of rollup expansion.

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What if the blockchain performance debates of 2021-2023 already feel ancient? In 2025, the industry quietly crossed a threshold that venture capitalists and skeptics alike thought was years away: multiple mainnets now routinely process thousands of transactions per second while keeping fees below a single cent. The era of "blockchain can't scale" has officially ended.

This isn't about theoretical benchmarks or testnet claims. Real users, real applications, and real money are flowing through networks that would have been science fiction just two years ago. Let's examine the hard numbers behind blockchain's performance revolution.

The New TPS Leaders: No Longer a Two-Horse Race​

The performance landscape has fundamentally shifted. While Bitcoin and Ethereum dominated blockchain conversations for years, 2025 established a new generation of speed champions.

Solana set the headline-grabbing record on August 17, 2025, processing 107,664 transactions per second on its mainnet—not in a laboratory, but under real-world conditions. This wasn't a one-off spike; the network demonstrated sustained high throughput that validates years of architectural decisions prioritizing performance.

But Solana's achievement is just one data point in a broader revolution:

• Aptos has demonstrated 13,367 TPS on mainnet without failures, delays, or gas fee spikes. Their Block-STM parallel execution engine theoretically supports up to 160,000 TPS.
• Sui has proven 297,000 TPS in controlled testing, with mainnet peaks reaching 822 TPS under typical usage and the Mysticeti v2 consensus achieving just 390ms latency.
• BNB Chain consistently delivers around 2,200 TPS in production, with the Lorentz and Maxwell hard forks delivering 4x faster block times.
• Avalanche processes 4,500 TPS through its unique subnet architecture, enabling horizontal scaling across specialized chains.

These numbers represent a 10x to 100x improvement over what the same networks achieved in 2023. More importantly, they're not theoretical maximums—they're observed, verifiable performance under actual usage conditions.

Firedancer: The Million-TPS Client That Changed Everything​

The most significant technical breakthrough of 2025 wasn't a new blockchain—it was Firedancer, Jump Crypto's complete reimplementation of the Solana validator client. After three years of development, Firedancer went live on mainnet on December 12, 2025.

The numbers are staggering. In demonstrations at Breakpoint 2024, Jump's Chief Scientist Kevin Bowers showed Firedancer processing over 1 million transactions per second on commodity hardware. Benchmarks consistently showed 600,000 to 1,000,000 TPS in controlled tests—20x higher than the previous Agave client's demonstrated throughput.

What makes Firedancer different? Architecture. Unlike Agave's monolithic design, Firedancer uses a modular, tile-based architecture that splits validator tasks to run in parallel. Written in C rather than Rust, every component was optimized for raw performance from the ground up.

The adoption trajectory tells its own story. Frankendancer, a hybrid implementation combining Firedancer's networking stack with Agave's runtime, now runs on 207 validators representing 20.9% of all staked SOL—up from just 8% in June 2025. This isn't experimental software anymore; it's infrastructure that secures billions of dollars.

Solana's Alpenglow upgrade in September 2025 added another layer, replacing the original Proof of History and TowerBFT mechanisms with new Votor and Rotor systems. The result: 150ms block finality and support for multiple concurrent leaders enabling parallel execution.

Sub-Penny Fees: EIP-4844's Quiet Revolution​

While TPS numbers grab headlines, the fee revolution is equally transformative. Ethereum's EIP-4844 upgrade in March 2024 fundamentally restructured how Layer 2 networks pay for data availability, and by 2025, the effects became impossible to ignore.

The mechanism is elegant: blob transactions provide temporary data storage for rollups at a fraction of previous costs. Where Layer 2s previously competed for expensive calldata space, blobs offer 18-day temporary storage that rollups actually need.

The impact on fees was immediate and dramatic:

• Arbitrum fees dropped from $0.37 to $0.012 per transaction
• Optimism fell from $0.32 to $0.009
• Base achieved fees as low as $0.01

These aren't promotional rates or subsidized transactions—they're sustainable operating costs enabled by architectural improvement. Ethereum now effectively provides 10-100x cheaper data storage for Layer 2 solutions.

The activity surge followed predictably. Base saw a 319.3% increase in daily transactions post-upgrade, Arbitrum increased 45.7%, and Optimism rose 29.8%. Users and developers responded exactly as economics predicted: when transactions become cheap enough, usage explodes.

The May 2025 Pectra upgrade pushed further, expanding blob throughput from 6 to 9 blobs per block and raising the gas limit to 37.3 million. Ethereum's effective TPS through Layer 2s now exceeds 100,000, with average transaction costs dropping to $0.08 on L2 networks.

The Real-World Performance Gap​

Here's what the benchmarks don't tell you: theoretical TPS and observed TPS remain very different numbers. This gap reveals important truths about blockchain maturity.

Consider Avalanche. While the network supports 4,500 TPS theoretically, observed activity averages around 18 TPS, with the C-Chain closer to 3-4 TPS. Sui demonstrates 297,000 TPS in testing but peaks at 822 TPS on mainnet.

This isn't failure—it's proof of headroom. These networks can handle massive demand spikes without degradation. When the next NFT frenzy or DeFi summer arrives, the infrastructure won't buckle.

The practical implications matter enormously for builders:

• Gaming applications need consistent low latency more than peak TPS
• DeFi protocols require predictable fees during volatility
• Payment systems demand reliable throughput during holiday shopping spikes
• Enterprise applications need guaranteed SLAs regardless of network conditions

Networks with significant headroom can offer these guarantees. Those operating near capacity cannot.

Move VM Chains: The Performance Architecture Advantage​

A pattern emerges when examining 2025's top performers: the Move programming language shows up repeatedly. Both Sui and Aptos, built by teams with Facebook/Diem heritage, leverage Move's object-centric data model for parallelization advantages impossible in account-model blockchains.

Aptos's Block-STM engine demonstrates this clearly. By processing transactions simultaneously rather than sequentially, the network achieved 326 million successful transactions in a single day during peak periods—while maintaining approximately $0.002 average fees.

Sui's approach differs but follows similar principles. The Mysticeti consensus protocol achieves 390ms latency by treating objects rather than accounts as the fundamental unit. Transactions that don't touch the same objects execute in parallel automatically.

Both networks attracted significant capital in 2025. BlackRock's BUIDL fund added $500 million in tokenized assets to Aptos in October, making it the second-largest BUIDL chain. Aptos also powered the official digital wallet for Expo 2025 in Osaka, processing 558,000+ transactions and onboarding 133,000+ users—real-world validation at scale.

What High TPS Actually Enables​

Beyond bragging rights, what do thousands of TPS unlock?

Institutional-grade settlement: When processing 2,000+ TPS with sub-second finality, blockchains compete directly with traditional payment rails. BNB Chain's Lorentz and Maxwell upgrades specifically targeted "Nasdaq-scale settlement" for institutional DeFi.

Microtransaction viability: At $0.01 per transaction, business models impossible at $5 fees become profitable. Streaming payments, per-API-call billing, and granular royalty distribution all require sub-penny economics.

Game state synchronization: Blockchain gaming requires updating player states hundreds of times per session. 2025's performance levels finally enable genuine on-chain gaming rather than the settlement-only models of previous years.

IoT and sensor networks: When devices can transact for fractions of a cent, supply chain tracking, environmental monitoring, and machine-to-machine payments become economically viable.

The common thread: 2025's performance improvements didn't just make existing applications faster—they enabled entirely new categories of blockchain usage.

The Decentralization Trade-off Debate​

Critics correctly note that raw TPS often correlates with reduced decentralization. Solana runs fewer validators than Ethereum. Aptos and Sui require more expensive hardware. These trade-offs are real.

But 2025 also demonstrated that the binary choice between speed and decentralization is false. Ethereum's Layer 2 ecosystem delivers 100,000+ effective TPS while inheriting Ethereum's security guarantees. Firedancer improves Solana's throughput without reducing validator counts.

The industry is learning to specialize: settlement layers optimize for security, execution layers optimize for speed, and proper bridging connects them. This modular approach—data availability from Celestia, execution from rollups, settlement on Ethereum—achieves speed, security, and decentralization through composition rather than compromise.

Looking Forward: The Million-TPS Mainnet​

If 2025 established high-TPS mainnets as reality rather than promise, what comes next?

Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade will introduce full danksharding via PeerDAS, potentially enabling millions of TPS across rollups. Firedancer's production deployment should push Solana toward its tested 1 million TPS capacity. New entrants continue emerging with novel architectures.

More importantly, the developer experience has matured. Building applications that require thousands of TPS is no longer a research project—it's standard practice. The tooling, documentation, and infrastructure supporting high-performance blockchain development in 2025 would be unrecognizable to a 2021 developer.

The question is no longer whether blockchain can scale. The question is what we'll build now that it has.

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What if you could verify a 500-page book exists without reading a single page? That's essentially what Ethereum just learned to do with PeerDAS—and it's quietly reshaping how blockchains can scale without sacrificing decentralization.

On December 3, 2025, Ethereum activated its Fusaka upgrade, introducing PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling) as the headline feature. While most headlines focused on the 40-60% fee reductions for Layer 2 networks, the underlying mechanism represents something far more significant: a fundamental shift in how blockchain nodes prove data exists without actually storing all of it.

In April 2025, Vitalik Buterin proposed something that would have seemed heretical a year earlier: replacing Ethereum's EVM with RISC-V. The suggestion sparked immediate debate. But what most commentators missed was that Polkadot had already been building exactly this architecture for over a year—and was months away from deploying it to production.

Polkadot's JAM (Join-Accumulate Machine) isn't just another blockchain upgrade. It represents a fundamental rethinking of what a "blockchain" even means. Where Ethereum's worldview centers on a global virtual machine processing transactions, JAM eliminates the transaction concept entirely at its core layer, replacing it with a computation model that promises 850 MB/s data availability—42 times Polkadot's previous capacity and 650 times Ethereum's 1.3 MB/s.

The implications extend far beyond performance benchmarks. JAM may be the clearest articulation yet of a post-Ethereum paradigm for blockchain architecture.

The Gray Paper: Gavin Wood's Third Act​

Dr. Gavin Wood wrote the Ethereum Yellow Paper in 2014, providing the formal specification that made Ethereum possible. He followed with the Polkadot White Paper in 2016, introducing heterogeneous sharding and shared security. In April 2024, he released the JAM Gray Paper at Token2049 in Dubai—completing a trilogy that spans the entire history of programmable blockchains.

The Gray Paper describes JAM as "a global singleton permissionless object environment—akin to Ethereum's smart-contract environment—paired with secure sideband computation parallelized over a scalable node network." But this undersells the conceptual shift.

JAM doesn't just improve on existing blockchain designs. It asks: what if we stopped thinking about blockchains as virtual machines entirely?

The Transaction Problem​

Traditional blockchains—Ethereum included—are fundamentally transaction-processing systems. Users submit transactions, validators order and execute them, and the blockchain records state changes. This model has served well but carries inherent limitations:

• Sequential bottlenecks: Transactions must be ordered, creating throughput constraints
• Global state contention: Every transaction potentially touches shared state
• Execution coupling: Consensus and computation are tightly bound

JAM decouples these concerns through what Wood calls the "Refine-Accumulate" paradigm. The system operates in two phases:

Refine: Computation happens in parallel across the network. Work is divided into independent units that can execute simultaneously without coordination.

Accumulate: Results are collected and merged into global state. Only this phase requires consensus on ordering.

The result is a "transactionless" core protocol. JAM itself doesn't process transactions—applications built on JAM do. This separation allows the base layer to focus purely on secure, parallel computation.

PolkaVM: Why RISC-V Matters​

At the heart of JAM sits PolkaVM, a purpose-built virtual machine based on the RISC-V instruction set. This choice has profound implications for blockchain computation.

The EVM's Architectural Debt​

Ethereum's EVM was designed in 2013-2014, before many modern assumptions about blockchain execution were understood. Its architecture reflects that era:

• Stack-based execution: Operations push and pop values from an unbounded stack, requiring complex tracking
• 256-bit word size: Chosen for cryptographic convenience but wasteful for most operations
• Single-dimensional gas: One metric attempts to price vastly different computational resources
• Interpretation-only: EVM bytecode cannot be compiled to native code efficiently

These design decisions made sense as initial choices but create ongoing performance penalties.

RISC-V's Advantages​

PolkaVM takes a fundamentally different approach:

Register-based architecture: Like modern CPUs, PolkaVM uses a finite set of registers for argument passing. This aligns with actual hardware, enabling efficient translation to native instruction sets.

64-bit word size: Modern processors are 64-bit. Using a matching word size eliminates the overhead of emulating 256-bit operations for the vast majority of computations.

Multi-dimensional gas: Different resources (computation, storage, bandwidth) are priced independently, better reflecting true costs and preventing mispricing attacks.

Dual execution modes: Code can be interpreted for immediate execution or JIT-compiled for optimized performance. The system chooses the appropriate mode based on workload characteristics.

Performance Impact​

The architectural differences translate to real performance gains. Benchmarks show PolkaVM achieving 10x+ improvements over WebAssembly for arithmetic-intensive contracts—and the EVM is slower still. For complex, multi-contract interactions, the gap widens further as JIT compilation amortizes setup costs.

Perhaps more importantly, PolkaVM supports any language that compiles to RISC-V. While EVM developers are limited to Solidity, Vyper, and a handful of specialized languages, PolkaVM opens the door to Rust, C++, and eventually any LLVM-supported language. This dramatically expands the potential developer pool.

Maintaining Developer Experience​

Despite the architectural overhaul, PolkaVM maintains compatibility with existing workflows. The Revive compiler provides complete Solidity support, including inline assembler. Developers can continue using Hardhat, Remix, and MetaMask without changing their processes.

The Papermoon team demonstrated this compatibility by successfully migrating Uniswap V2's contract code to the PolkaVM testnet—proving that even complex, battle-tested DeFi code can transition without rewrites.

JAM's Performance Targets​

The numbers Wood projects for JAM are staggering by current blockchain standards.

Data Availability​

JAM targets 850 MB/s of data availability—roughly 42 times the vanilla Polkadot capacity before recent optimizations and 650 times Ethereum's 1.3 MB/s. For context, this approaches the throughput of enterprise database systems.

Computational Throughput​

The Gray Paper estimates JAM can achieve approximately 150 billion gas per second at full capacity. Translating gas to transactions is imprecise, but theoretical maximum throughput reaches 3.4+ million TPS based on the data availability target.

Real-World Validation​

These aren't purely theoretical numbers. Stress tests have validated the architecture:

• Kusama (August 2025): Achieved 143,000 TPS at only 23% load capacity
• Polkadot "Spammening" (2024): Reached 623,000 TPS in controlled testing

These figures represent genuine transaction throughput, not optimistic projections or testnet conditions that don't reflect production environments.

Development Status and Timeline​

JAM development follows a structured milestone system, with 43 implementation teams competing for a prize pool exceeding $60 million (10 million DOT + 100,000 KSM).

Current Progress (Late 2025)​

The ecosystem has reached several critical milestones:

• Multiple teams have achieved 100% conformance with Web3 Foundation test vectors
• Development has progressed through Gray Paper versions 0.6.2 through 0.8.0, approaching v1.0
• The JAM Experience conference in Lisbon (May 2025) brought together implementation teams for deep technical collaboration
• University tours reached over 1,300 attendees across nine global locations, including Cambridge, Peking University, and Fudan University

Milestone Structure​

Teams progress through a series of milestones:

1. IMPORTER (M1): Passing state-transitioning conformance tests and importing blocks
2. AUTHORER (M2): Full conformance including block production, networking, and off-chain components
3. HALF-SPEED (M3): Achieving Kusama-level performance, with access to JAM Toaster for full-scale testing
4. FULL-SPEED (M4): Polkadot mainnet-level performance with professional security audits

Multiple teams have completed M1, with several progressing toward M2.

Timeline to Mainnet​

• Late 2025: Final Gray Paper revisions, continued milestone submissions, expanded testnet participation
• Q1 2026: JAM mainnet upgrade on Polkadot following governance approval via OpenGov referendum
• 2026: CoreChain Phase 1 deployment, official public JAM testnet, full network transition

The governance process has already shown strong community support. A near-unanimous DOT holder vote approved the upgrade direction in May 2024.

JAM vs. Ethereum: Complementary or Competitive?​

The question of whether JAM represents an "Ethereum killer" misses the architectural nuance.

Different Design Philosophies​

Ethereum builds outward from a monolithic foundation. The EVM provides a global execution environment, and scaling solutions—L2s, rollups, sharding—layer on top. This approach has created an enormous ecosystem but also accumulated technical debt.

JAM starts with modularity at its core. The separation of Refine and Accumulate phases, the domain-specific optimization for rollup handling, and the transactionless base layer all reflect a ground-up design for scalability.

Convergent Technical Choices​

Despite different starting points, the projects are converging on similar conclusions. Vitalik's April 2025 RISC-V proposal acknowledged that the EVM's architecture limits long-term performance. Polkadot had already deployed RISC-V support to testnet months earlier.

This convergence validates both projects' technical judgment while highlighting the execution gap: Polkadot is shipping what Ethereum is proposing.

Ecosystem Realities​

Technical superiority doesn't automatically translate to ecosystem dominance. Ethereum's developer community, application diversity, and liquidity depth represent substantial network effects that can't be replicated overnight.

The more likely outcome isn't replacement but specialization. JAM's architecture is optimized for certain workloads—particularly high-throughput applications and rollup infrastructure—while Ethereum retains advantages in ecosystem maturity and capital formation.

In 2026, they look less like competitors and more like complementary layers of a multi-chain internet.

What JAM Means for Blockchain Architecture​

JAM's significance extends beyond Polkadot. It represents the clearest articulation of a post-EVM paradigm that other projects will study and selectively adopt.

Key Principles​

Computation separation: Decoupling execution from consensus enables parallel processing at the base layer, not as an afterthought.

Domain-specific optimization: Rather than building a general-purpose VM and hoping it scales, JAM is architected specifically for the workloads blockchains actually run.

Hardware alignment: Using RISC-V and 64-bit words aligns virtual machine architecture with physical hardware, eliminating emulation overhead.

Transaction abstraction: Moving transaction handling to the application layer allows the protocol to focus on computation and state management.

Industry Impact​

Whether JAM succeeds or fails commercially, these architectural choices will influence blockchain design for the next decade. The Gray Paper provides a formal specification that other projects can study, critique, and selectively implement.

Ethereum's RISC-V proposal already demonstrates this influence. The question isn't whether these ideas will spread, but how quickly and in what form.

The Road Ahead​

JAM represents Gavin Wood's most ambitious technical vision since Polkadot itself. The stakes match the ambition: success would validate an entirely different approach to blockchain architecture, while failure would leave Polkadot competing with newer L1s without a differentiated technical narrative.

The next 18 months will determine whether JAM's theoretical advantages translate to production reality. With 43 implementation teams, a nine-figure prize pool, and a clear roadmap to mainnet, the project has resources and momentum. What remains to be seen is whether the complexity of the Refine-Accumulate paradigm can deliver on Wood's vision of a "distributed computer that can run almost any kind of task."

For developers and projects evaluating blockchain infrastructure, JAM merits serious attention—not as hype, but as a technically rigorous attempt to solve problems that every major blockchain faces. The blockchain-as-virtual-machine paradigm served the industry well for a decade. JAM bets that the next decade requires something fundamentally different.

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