Ethereum Layer 2 Turbo claims to process 400,000 transactions per second

Ethereum scaling solution Turbo Protocol launched a new blockchain reportedly capable of processing 400,000 transactions per second, or about 4,000 times faster than a high-throughput chain like Solana, the team announced at the Blockchain Application Stanford Summit on Tuesday.

The project is one of many emerging efforts to experiment with “parallel transaction processing,” the process of recording multiple transactions concurrently, “as opposed to sequentially, as currently happens on Ethereum,” the Turbo team wrote in a press release. 

For comparison, the Ethereum base layer processes about 20 to 30 transactions per second, rival network Solana a little over 1,000, while global payments company Visa settles about 24,000 in a similar time frame. 

Turbo CEO Aaron Greenblatt demonstrated the live blockchain during a talk at the Blockchain Application Stanford Summit in New York City, noting that applications that launch on the Layer 2 network will not need to compete over Ethereum gas fees. 

“Any web3 project that is looking to move heavy computational workloads on-chain can use Turbo Protocol,” Greenblatt said. “That could be projects in the decentralized AI, gaming, and social verticals.”

Since the network launched in 2015, Ethereum has been constrained by its slow transaction processing time and frequently sees periods of expensive fees as users have to compete to have their transactions permanently included in a block. 

Layer 2 networks like Turbo, Optimism and Polygon, among others, are all taking various approaches to create more efficient blockchain platforms where batches of transactions are eventually “rolled up” onto the main Ethereum blockchain.