Hong Kong | February 11, 2026 — Psy Protocol today announced that it has achieved 521,000 transactions per second (TPS) on a live, on-chain verifiable Proof-of-Work (PoW) network. The team stated that this result, achieved without sacrificing decentralization, security, or privacy, surpasses all publicly benchmarked performances of mainstream Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and Proof-of-Work chains to date.
The stress test was conducted on thousands of Google Cloud instances to simulate a high-concurrency, internet-scale operating environment. Every transaction in the benchmark is backed by cryptographic proof, and the complete dataset has been published for independent verification.
To demonstrate confidence in the results, Psy Protocol has publicly posted a $100,000 (US$100,000) bounty, to be awarded to any individual or team that can invalidate this throughput result based on the published proof materials.
"This is not a devnet demo, nor a theoretical projection," said Carter Feldman, Founder and CEO of Psy Protocol. "Every single result is verifiable. If we are wrong, the math will show it—and we will pay $100,000 to the person who shows it."
Why 521,000 TPS Matters Now
High-throughput benchmarks are not uncommon in the crypto industry. Psy Protocol believes this result is structurally significant because of the use-case context it addresses.
Blockchains were originally designed around human transaction patterns: sporadically occurring activities, manual approvals, and low concurrency. However, this model is becoming increasingly mismatched as millions of autonomous AI agents transact, collaborate, and settle at machine speeds continuously in the future.
When networks designed for human-scale usage encounter sustained machine-grade demand, the result is often network congestion, soaring 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 the Architecture Works
Most blockchains require every node to re-execute every transaction, a design that imposes a hard architectural ceiling on throughput. Psy Protocol removes this bottleneck through four synergistic design choices:
- Parallel State Architecture (PARTH): Each user operates in isolated state partitions. This eliminates global state contention, allowing thousands of state transitions to be processed simultaneously without conflict.
- Client-Side Proof Generation: Transaction execution and proof generation are performed on the user's device, with sensitive data always remaining under the user's control. Miners are only responsible for verifying and aggregating proofs, not re-executing transactions, thus eliminating redundant computation across the entire network.
- Recursive Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Individual transaction proofs are recursively folded into a single succinct proof per block. As transaction volume grows, verification costs grow logarithmically rather than linearly, meaning massive throughput increases do not require proportional increases in resources.
- Horizontal Scaling via Realms: The network scales by adding parallel processing domains ("Realms") and proof aggregation capacity. Throughput increases linearly with added infrastructure, rather than being limited by a fixed architectural cap.
Psy Protocol states that 521,000 TPS reflects the result in the current test configuration; higher throughput is achievable by scaling parallel proof generation capacity.
Verification: Open Data, Verifiable on Consumer Hardware
Because verification relies on succinct recursive proofs rather than full re-execution, Psy Protocol states that any combined proof from the benchmark can be independently verified on consumer-grade hardware—including limited-performance devices like a Raspberry Pi.
The complete test methodology, ZK circuit data, and combined proofs have all been open-sourced and are available at:
https://st8.psy.xyz/explorer
Applications Feasible at This Scale
With sustained throughput exceeding 500,000 TPS, the following new types of on-chain activity become feasible:
- High-frequency micropayments between autonomous agents
- Continuous clearing markets with real-time settlement replacing discrete batch settlement
- High-density coordination among large-scale AI agent swarms operating without human intervention
- Keyless agent execution via programmable signature circuits, eliminating reliance on human-controlled private keys or third-party custody
About Psy Protocol
Psy Protocol is building a Proof-of-Work smart contract platform for the "agentic internet." Its architecture combines the security and decentralization benefits 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—namely, aggregating and verifying zero-knowledge proofs—rather than arbitrary hash puzzle computations.
