Stellar: The Road to 5000 TPS – Scaling Stellar in 2025

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has set a goal to enhance the Stellar network’s throughput to 5000 transactions per second (TPS) by 2025. This initiative includes the adoption of Protocol 23, which introduces multi-threaded smart contract execution and caching, allowing nodes to function efficiently without new hardware upgrades. The improvements leverage increased parallelism and decouple consensus from execution, permitting these processes to occur simultaneously. Aggressive caching techniques are also employed to improve ledger state management. Additionally, smarter benchmarking frameworks are being developed for accurate performance assessment. These enhancements aim to facilitate greater application development and network reliability, ultimately benefiting both developers and end-users by ensuring quicker transactions at a lower cost.