Scaling the Machine Economy | High TPS done right

The Machine Economy is growing. With every new DePIN, device, and user joining the network, the demand on its infrastructure keeps rising. As the backbone of the Machine Economy, peaq needs to provide a scaling architecture built for decades to come.

Blockchain scaling has been a topic for many years and, frankly, most get it wrong.

In this article we’ll  dive into peaq’s scaling architecture and why it’s superior to other prevailing approaches in the industry. 

High TPS and low block time are now live on peaq’s new testnet, which will replace agung once testing for the Get Real campaign is complete. And soon, you can expect this update to come to Mainnet as well. 

Missed the live demo? Watch the replay:

At a high level, peaq achieves this by applying an elastic approach to scaling, rather than a monolithic one. This allows peaq to produce blocks in parallel, finalize them asynchronously and scale based on demand.   

Let’s take a closer look at how an elastic architecture, rather than a tightly coupled monolith, makes this not only possible but the logical default.

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Elastic vs. Monolithic Architecture

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The Issues with Monolithic Architecture

Many blockchains that brand themselves as “high performance” bundle block production, validation, and finalization into a tightly coupled, monolithic system. They scale by scaling the box. In other words, when demand rises, the default response is to add more powerful hardware. They also need to fork or pass a runtime upgrade if they want to increase blocksize or reduce block generation time. 

In the early days of Web2, many monolithic systems hit a wall and crashed under high loads, as user numbers grew. Soon, the “add more hardware” approach started to deliver diminishing returns. The fix came when the industry moved from monolithic to Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). This allowed for the backends of applications to be compartmentalized into so called micro-services that could run in parallel and be scaled individually. The practice of scaling systems vertically all the time to fix a single bottleneck gave way to horizontal scaling.

We now see the same pattern playing out in Web3. Blockchains that produce blocks monolithically hit a wall when traffic spikes and sometimes crash. Better hardware and networking alone don’t solve the root cause — they’re just short term patches. The real issue is architectural: a monolith only scales so far. 

Monolithic, tightly coupled systems have components with strong interdependencies. A small change in one component can cause widespread ripple effects, making the system fragile, difficult to test, and hard to maintain. 

The takeaway from Web2 is clear: scale through the architecture, not the box.

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Elastic Architecture

peaq takes an elastic approach. Instead of one tightly coupled system, peaq has a loosely coupled architecture, which splits the block production process into microservice-like components called “cores,” which can scale independently and on-demand. That separation is what enables parallel block production and asynchronous block finalization. While some blocks finalize, new ones are being produced and pre-validated in parallel. Capacity comes from software orchestration, not just higher hardware specs.

What “elastic” means in this context:

• Split process: Block Production → Pre-validation → Finalization are separate components and each can scale on its own.
• On-demand capacity: When load spikes, new cores get added elastically without requiring a hard fork or runtime upgrade. 
• Parallization: Production, pre-validation, and finalization run in parallel—while some blocks finalize, new ones are already being produced and validated.
• Decentralized: Capacity comes from software orchestration rather than ever-bigger boxes, reducing single-lane chokepoints and enabling broader participation.

Loosely coupled systems like peaq have minimal dependencies between components.This allows for independent development, easier modification and better fault tolerance, as changes to one component have less impact on others.

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Parallelized vs. Sequential Block Production

On most blockchains, only one block producer is active per slot — a single production lane. Even if execution inside a block is parallel, at the protocol level, blocks are still produced sequentially, one at a time.

peaq departs from this baseline. Multiple producer cores can produce, validate and finalize  blocks concurrently. In practice, that means several blocks can be ‘in flight’ at once, instead of waiting in a single line. And as demand rises, additional cores can be spun up to increase concurrent block production.

In terms of throughput, more cores mean more blocks per time slice. Scaling is near-linear within the limits of bandwidth, consensus messaging and storage.

If you want a quick mental model, think CPU vs. GPU: While a CPU provides a few powerful lanes optimized for sequential work, a GPU has many lightweight lanes for parallel workloads. It’s a simplified way to picture “one lane” vs “many lanes” at the protocol level.

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Why Elastic Scaling is the Way to Go

The early Web2 days have shown us that monolithic designs hit a wall sooner or later, no matter how much hardware you add. 

When building peaq - the computer powering the Machine Economy - we build it with billions of machine and human users in mind. peaq needs to be able to scale as demand rises with an architecture that solves bottlenecks horizontally, rather than vertically. 

We also need to ensure that peaq’s scaling architecture supports decentralization and is resistant to censorship. We consider this a prerequisite for enabling anyone to trust in the infrastructure powering the global Machine Economy. Vertical scaling through monolithic architectures or centralized scaling through centralized sequencers simply do not meet the same standards for decentralization and censorship resistance. 

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Built to Scale with the Machine Economy

As machines continue to plug into the Machine Economy, demand for speed and scalability will only grow. Networks built for people weren’t designed to handle billions of machines, each submitting data, triggering smart contracts, and transacting autonomously.

peaq is.

By combining parallelized block production and asynchronous finalization, peaq delivers high throughput and low block time, scaling elastically as demand increases. 

Because in the Machine Economy, downtime isn’t an option.

High TPS and low block time are now live on peaq’s testnet, and are coming to mainnet soon. In the meantime, make sure you hop over to the demo page and see these capabilities in action for yourself.