Built for Scale

Benchmarked against real workloads. Post-quantum crypto without performance compromise.

2s
Block Time

Consistent 2-second block intervals

30M
Gas Limit

Per-block gas matching Ethereum mainnet

~2s
Finality

Sub-2-second finality with wPoA consensus

~714
TPS Baseline

Peak simple-transfer TPS at 30M gas/block

TPS by Transaction Type(30M gas · 2s block · parallel EVM)

~714Simple Transfer
~300ERC-20 Transfer
~150Contract Call
~75Complex DeFi

Based on 30M gas/block · 2s block time · Parallel EVM · STARK sig-aggregation (v0.15.0) · CPU overhead < 15ms per block

Benchmark Results

Alpha Test · v0.15.0

Cryptography

Dilithium3 (ML-DSA)
Key Generation56 µs
Sign67 µs
Verify39 µs
Batch Verify (100 sigs)958 µs
Theoretical Verify/sec~25,000

Transaction Processing

shell-core
TX RLP Encode71 ns
TX RLP Decode118 ns
TX Hash (SHA3)372 ns
Base Fee Calc2 ns
SHA3-256 (1 MB)1.17 ms

Storage & State

shell-storage
Block Encode835 ns
Block Decode1.56 µs
ChainStore Write3.4 µs
ChainStore Read1.85 µs
Merkle Trie Insert290 ns

STARK Sig-Aggregation

shell-stark-prover
Compression (batch=5)7.1×
Compression (batch=10)4.0×
Soak throughput (6 h)157 proofs/s
Mean prove latency6.4 ms
p99 prove latency18.7 ms

Benchmarked with Criterion.rs on Apple Silicon · Single-core results

Block Compression

Shrink the Chain, Not the Security

Three complementary compression layers reduce a worst-case 7.76 MB block (30M gas / 2 s) down to ~425 KB on disk — an ~18× end-to-end reduction.

Block Compression Pipeline

Raw BlockFull Dilithium3 sigs + pubkeys · ~7.76 MB at 30M gas / 2 s~7.76 MB
ZstdRocksDB cold compression8–15% saved
Pubkey DedupReference mode on repeat sendersup to 34% block saving
STARK AggregateOne proof per block replaces N sig pairsup to 7.1×
Stored BlockStripped body · ~1.5 MB (proof retained) / ~425 KB (pruned)~425 KB
Layer 1

RocksDB Zstd

All block data is stored with Zstd cold compression (level 3). Negligible read latency overhead (<2%) with 5–15% raw storage savings on top of every other layer.

39 MiB/swrite throughput under compression
Layer 2

PQ Pubkey Deduplication

Dilithium3 public keys are 1952 bytes each. The first transaction from an address embeds the full key; subsequent transactions in the same block store only a 32-byte address reference.

1,932 Bsaved per repeated sender tx
Layer 3

STARK Sig-Aggregation

A Winterfell STARK circuit aggregates all Dilithium3 signatures in a block into a single proof. The full sig+pubkey data (3309 + 1952 bytes per tx) is replaced by one shared proof, pruned after the proving window.

7.1×compression at batch=5

Why it matters

⚡Non-blocking

STARK proving is fully asynchronous — block production never waits for a proof.

💾Less Storage (~18×)

Full nodes store stripped block bodies after the proving window. A 7.76 MB worst-case block reaches ~425 KB on disk — an ~18× reduction.

🌐Faster Propagation

Smaller stripped blocks propagate faster over P2P, improving time-to-finality.

🔐Zero Security Tradeoff

STARK proofs are cryptographically binding. PQ signatures remain fully verifiable via the witness store.