Hong Kong | February 11, 2026 — Psy Protocol today announced it has achieved 521,000 transactions per second (TPS) on a live, on-chain verifiable Proof-of-Work network. The team stated that this result surpasses all publicly reported benchmarks of major Proof-of-Stake and Proof-of-Work chains to date, without compromising decentralization, security, or privacy.
This stress test was conducted on thousands of Google Cloud instances to simulate a high-concurrency, internet-scale operating environment. Each transaction in the benchmark is backed by cryptographic proof, and the full dataset has been published for independent verification.
To demonstrate confidence in the results, Psy Protocol has publicly established a $100,000 bounty for any individual or team that can prove, based on the published evidence, that the throughput results are invalid.
“This is not a testnet demo or theoretical speculation,” said Carter Feldman, founder and CEO of Psy Protocol. “Every result is verifiable. If we’re wrong, mathematics will prove it—and we will pay $100,000 to anyone who proves it.”
Why is 521,000 TPS significant today?
High throughput benchmarks are not uncommon in the crypto industry. Psy Protocol believes this result is structurally significant, particularly in the context of the use cases it targets.
Blockchain was originally designed around human transaction patterns: sporadic activities, manual approvals, and low concurrency. However, as millions of autonomous AI agents begin to conduct transactions, collaborate, and settle at machine speed, this model is becoming increasingly mismatched.
When a network designed for human-scale usage encounters sustained machine-level demand, the result is often network congestion, soaring transaction fees, and cascading bottlenecks. Psy Protocol views 521,000 TPS as the baseline infrastructure required for a machine-native economy, not a performance ceiling.
How does the architecture work?
Most blockchains require every node to re-execute every transaction, a design that imposes a hard throughput limit at the architectural level. Psy Protocol removes this bottleneck through four interdependent design choices:
- Parallel State Architecture (PARTH): Each user operates within an isolated state partition. This eliminates global state contention, enabling thousands of state transitions to be processed simultaneously without conflicts.
- Proof generation on the client side: Transaction execution and proof generation are completed on the user’s device, ensuring that sensitive data remains under the user’s exclusive control. Miners are only responsible for verifying and aggregating proofs, not re-executing transactions, thereby eliminating redundant computations across the entire network.
- Recursive zero-knowledge proofs: Proofs for individual transactions are recursively folded into a single succinct proof per block. As transaction volume increases, verification costs grow logarithmically rather than linearly, enabling significantly higher throughput without a proportional increase in verification resources.
- Scale horizontally with Realms: The network scales by adding parallel processing domains ("Realms") and proof aggregation capabilities. Throughput increases linearly with infrastructure growth, rather than being limited by a fixed architectural ceiling.
Psy Protocol states that the 521,000 TPS reflects results under the current test configuration; higher throughput can be achieved by scaling parallel proof generation capabilities.
Verification method: Open data, verifiable with consumer-grade hardware
Because verification relies on succinct recursive proofs rather than full re-execution, Psy Protocol states that any combination of proofs in the benchmark can be verified independently on consumer-grade hardware—including devices with limited performance, such as the Raspberry Pi.
The complete testing methodology, ZK circuit data, and composite proof have been fully open-sourced. Access here:
Viable use cases at this scale
Under conditions of sustained throughput exceeding 500,000 TPS, the following new types of on-chain activities will become feasible:
- High-frequency micropayments between autonomous agents
- A continuous clearing market that replaces discrete batch settlements with real-time settlement
- High-density collaboration among large-scale AI agent populations operating without human intervention
- Enable keyless proxy execution through programmable signing circuits, eliminating reliance on human control of private keys or third-party custody.
About Psy Protocol
Psy Protocol is building a proof-of-work smart contract platform designed for the agentic internet. Its architecture combines the security and decentralization advantages of proof-of-work with the throughput and fee efficiency historically associated with proof-of-stake systems. Psy employs a "Proof-of-Useful-Work" (PoUW) consensus model, where miners perform cryptographically productive work—aggregating and verifying zero-knowledge proofs—rather than solving arbitrary hash puzzles.