Imagine a highway: the more lanes you have, the more cars can drive at the same time without creating a traffic jam.
For a blockchain network, a high-throughput sequencer widens that highway, allowing much more data and complex operations to flow smoothly. This is especially important for applications such as onchain games, demanding DeFi protocols, and social apps, where large volumes of transactions and interactions need to be processed without delay.
The throughput of the sequencer determines how much computation a blockchain can process in a given time, which directly impacts the scalability and efficiency of dapps. Higher throughput allows the network to handle peaks in user activity and support more complex, resource-intensive applications.
Today, Conduit announced a tenfold improvement in throughput with the launch of G2, which it claims is the most powerful sequencer in the world. G2 is based on an alleged computing load of 50-100 million gas per second (Mgas/s).
Read more in our opinion section: L2 centralization is a ticking time bomb for blockchain
The G2 sequencer is built on a series of technological advancements, including deep database optimizations and improvements in algorithmic efficiency, said Andrew Huang, Conduit’s founder.
“There isn’t a single breakthrough,” Huang told Blockworks, “but rather a series of incremental optimizations – a 5% gain here, a 10% gain there, and over time it just gets bigger.” These improvements span every layer of the stack, from data access and storage to the cloud-native infrastructure that orchestrates the system.
Under heavy workloads, sequencers can struggle to keep up with the head of the chain. G2 capacity opens the door to applications that were previously impossible to run completely onchain, such as Web3 games. Launched by Proof of Play in December 2022, Pirate Nation debuted on the Polygon PoS chain before later migrating to the Arbitrum Orbit tech stack for its Apex and Boss chains.
Read more: A wave of new games could prove that NFTs aren’t dead after all
“As the platform grew, a more scalable and cost-effective solution was needed, which led to the development of [the] Job chains,” a spokesperson told Blockworks.
The game is one of the first projects to use G2. Apex and Boss are both among the top three Mgas/s chains according to rollup.wtf, a dashboard built by Conduit. The Proof of Play team maintains that this activity represents organic use.
“Pirate Nation is making banning bots a top priority,” the spokesperson said, adding that “the Proof of Play team has fine-tuned the incentive structure and processes to ensure the game is played by real people with one real account .”
With G2, the team was able to solve its scaling challenge and expand capacity with additional chains as needed.
“Gaming is actually pushing the boundaries,” says Huang. “These are clearly the most demanding applications.” But he also highlighted Gravity, a Web2 app originally known as Galxe, which successfully migrated its entire database of 26 million active users onchain using G2. That wouldn’t have been feasible without the improved transit, he said.
Read more: Crypto Infrastructure Is Growing – Are We Building Too Much?
Mgas/s as a better scaling metric
Measuring the throughput of blockchain sequencers by Mgas/s replaces the traditional transactions per second (TPS) metric when it comes to assessing relative scalability. “TPS is a dead metric,” Huang said. “It doesn’t tell you anything about how much computing power is actually happening in the chain.”
TPS can be misleading because eye-popping numbers can be the result of artificially maximizing bandwidth with simple token transfers rather than real-world usage.
Mgas/s, on the other hand, provides a much clearer picture of rollup performance, especially when dealing with more complex applications. It covers different types of workloads – from compute to storage – in one figure.
“It’s not perfect because you’re putting a multi-dimensional thing into a single metric, but it’s much better,” Huang said.
Although current public benchmarks remain limited, Huang says this is just the beginning. The G2 team is already working on gigaga throughput levels, or 1000 Mgas/s. That is also the goal of Base, the Ethereum layer-2 rollup built on Optimism’s OP Stack. Jesse Pollack outlined a plan in a recent 0xResearch podcast to gradually increase Base’s revenue toward its gig gas target over the coming year.
For comparison, Ethereum’s mainnet processes around 1-1.5 Mgas/s.
The move towards Ggas transit is expected to open up opportunities for even more compute-intensive dapps, such as social networks, prediction markets and high-frequency trading systems that require significant performance headroom.