How fast is Nano? 19.38 tps!
In other words...
only 1,674,830 people can use it daily,
using 6.03 GPUs of PoW.
that's 3.88 times Bitcoin's 5 tps,
and 0.007 times Solana's 2909 tps.
The historical average TPS for the nano cryptocurrency is a little less than 20 transactions per second. A lot of work will be needed for Nano to one day compete with more modern technologies in the top 100.
Each day nanotps.com checks the network's performance via a brief burst of activity. Blocks are broadcast all at once from a few thousand unique accounts, ensuring conditions are as favorable as can be. I've tried to make this analysis as fair and straightforward as possible.
To avoid underestimating the tps, the timer starts the moment the entire batch has been broadcast to all the nodes. We then wait for that many confirmations to occur, which may include blocks from real users. That way other people using the network won't change the results.
Once we have our confirmations, we divide the batch size by the number of seconds that have passed. We then divide by 2 to get our final tps. This is because sending Nano from one user to another requires two blocks, a send and receive, for the money to be spendable. If we didn't divide by 2, we'd need to more than double bitcoin's tps since a single transaction usually has multiple inputs and outputs.
Nano has suffered several attacks over its history. On days where nothing is happening, the tps can reach its highest values. But when an attacker actually tries to harm the network, performance has dropped dramatically. Usually there's some fixes a few months/years later, but in each case someone then takes the network down again. This is why I think it's really important to keep your nano on the exchanges. Otherwise you won't have the opportunity to sell when funds are frozen. What's especially frightening is that during those days, Nano was vulnerable to an easy double-spend attack. So you couldn't move your money and someone could have crashed the market by attacking an exchange. Scary!
Better hardware and fewer nodes. Nano's network overhead scales with the square of the number of PRs, so if you're delegating to a small or slow one, consider moving away. There is a security tradeoff in doing so, but if capacity is your goal, this makes sense. In the long term software updates and moving away from ORV may help as well.
A few GPUs spamming, the introduction of forks, and bandwidth cuts dramatically reduce throughput. Forks take substantially longer to resolve and can be generated faster than normal block spam since every side of a fork shares the same PoW. Those days where the graph reports numbers near zero are ones where an attacker was present. This shows we're probably dramatically overestimating the performance capabilities of the nano network.
Beta's performance isn't representative of mainnet due to the composition of PRs. This as true for Nano as it is in other cryptocurrencies, where beta setups commonly perform thousands of times better due to their unrealistic testing conditions.
Absolutely, and due to Nano's prioritization system, this traffic should be deprioritized over other people's activity. I've timed the tests to run when usage has been historically low, and the same accounts are used each day to maximize prunability.
People ask all the time about Nano's tps, but there aren't good resources for tracking it. Numbers in the hundreds or even thousands per second are commonly thrown around. Nano's official twitter recently suggested that it was about 1000 (the team deleted it and thanked me once I showed this wasn't true — props to them for doing that). Sometimes people will be linked the peak performance observed during various spam attacks, but what end users should care about is not the rare moments of bursty confirmations but rather the sustained tps with which they can interact with the network.
Update: After getting banned the community is back to lying about it. Oh well.
I was banned on the official Discord and Subreddit due to my criticisms of the foundation's priorities. It's also just not worth putting up with this community. People kept asking me to use misleading statistics to make things look better, and I'd get regular waves of hate for posting these numbers. I keep this page up for its historical value.
Check out my Nano Nakamoto Coefficient Calculator for more up-to-date work!