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slide 10 · fundamentals

Performance & scalability

BTC · 7 tps
ETH · 15 tps
L2 · 2k tps
Visa · 24k tps

, latency and across Bitcoin, Ethereum, L2s and Visa.

  1. 1Drag the congestion slider
  2. 2Compare tps, fees and finality
  3. 3Spot the trilemma trade-off
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fee 0.0005 · total 0.5005 BTC
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Throughput — transactions per second (log-ish scale)

Ethereum L1 · under load

Block time
12 s
Finality
~13 min (2 epochs)
Typical fee
$0.50 – $20
Decentralization
88/100
incoming demand500 tx/s
› demand exceeds capacity by 485 tx/s · backlog grows 240× faster than it clears · fee auction begins, cheap transactions stall

Programmable but congested. Gas auctions price scarce block space, so fees spike with demand. This is the scalability trilemma in one screen: pick two of decentralization, security and speed. Rollups cheat it by moving execution off-chain and keeping settlement on Ethereum — that is why L2 throughput looks nothing like L1.