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And why Monad, Solana and many shiny âfuture L1sâ fail the decentralization testâââwhile small, slow chains like Bitcoin and ADAMANT stay truly sovereign.
Every new âfuture-proofâ chain promises 100,000 TPS and sub-second finality, ânext-gen consensusâ.
It always sounds magical.
It never is.
Because physics, networking, and hardware reality immediately destroy the marketing fairy tale:
You cannot have both extreme throughput and extreme decentralization.
The higher the TPS, the fewer people can run a node.
Once you understand that, the entire L1 landscape looks very different.
To process 10â20k transactions per second, a node must:
This instantly eliminates:
Decentralization isnât a philosophy. Itâs simply:
âCan an average person run a full node?â
If the answer is no, the chain is centralizedâââno matter how good the marketing sounds.
Letâs check the hardware requirements for running nodes, as well as the costs to mine or validate blocks.
TPS: ~7
Node requirements:
Mining:
Result:
Bitcoin is slow on purpose.
Slow = accessible = decentralized.
TPS: ~15â30
Node requirements:
Validating blocks:
Result:
ETH scales via L2 rollups, not via L1 inflation.
This is the correct design.
TPS: Advertised 50k+, real-world 300â1500
Node requirements:
Validating blocks:
Result:
Solana sacrifices decentralization for throughputâââknowingly.
Promised TPS:Â 10kâ20k
Expected hardware:
Validating blocks:
Result:
Monad is simply Solana with Solidityâââa valid design, but not a decentralized one.
TPS: ~56
Node requirements:
Mining:
Result:
LTC is decentralized because it stayed small and conservative.
TPS: tens
Node requirements:
Validating blocks:
Result:
ADM is what decentralization looks like in practiceââânot on slides.
This is the other half of decentralization that nobody discusses.
VC allocation = future sell pressure +Â control.
High TPS + high VC allocation = two layers of centralization at once.
Many modern chains market themselves as:
But in reality:
If only 0.01% of users can run a node, it is not a decentralized systemâââit is a CDN with a token.
And hereâs the painful truth:
It is better to have an honestly centralized system (like Tron) than a chain that pretends to be decentralized but isnât.
Why?
Projects will keep promising thousands TPS and âyour chain, but fasterâ. But the conclusion is brutally simple:
The more TPS a chain targets, the fewer humans can run it.
And the fewer humans can run it, the less decentralizedâââand less secureâââit is.
Real decentralization is not glamorous.
It is not fast.
It is not sexy.
It is not VC-friendly.
It is inexpensive, accessible, boring, resilient, censorship-resistant.
And thatâs why systems like Bitcoin, Litecoin, and ADAMANT survive cycles.
The TPS illusion: Why high-speed blockchains lie about decentralization was originally published in ADAMANT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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