The Algorand blockchain has just posted 2300 transactions per second for a sustained period of 10 minutes and counting, a feat not yet heard of — the highest number of real time transactions by real users on Algorand.
This all made possible by the insanity of Oranges (ORA), a mineable memecoin designed to show off the incredible transaction throughput of Algorand. In order to mine for ORA, users must submit a transaction to the mining application. Each transaction’s fee is recorded by the application, and every 5 blocks the user with the highest cumulative fees spent is rewarded with some ORA (their fees are then reset to zero). This process continues every five blocks.
This has resulted in thousand of Algorand users spamming the blockchain with high-fee transactions in order to get their chance at ORA, pushing the Algorand blockchain and ecosystem to its limit, all with real-user transactions.
Transaction Counting is not an Exact Science
It would be easy enough to title this post “Algorand breaks world record for blockchain transactions,” and that may very well be a true statement. But the reality is that transaction counting is not so easy, and that many blockchains record what they consider a transaction differently. A quick google search shows that blockchain TON (the Open Network) is claiming to have the record at 104,715 TPS — but their test was both on a testnet network and did not include real users. A search for mainnet TPS reveals more moderate results: Neon with 730 TPS on Solana, a screenshot of Solana showing ~1,220 TPS, and Hedera’s kingly claim of being able to handle 7,200 TPS per second.
All this to say that Algorand handling 2,000 transactions per second for a sustained time is super impressive. Not only that, but it was done by real people with self-serving purposes. Algorand is proving its capability in one of the most important metrics — the capacity to scale. Each of these transactions were done by real users paying a microsent fee, a level of scalability and speed not matched by any other network.
What actually caused Algorand’s 3 million txn Spike?
In complete irony, a meme about transactions caused Algorand to explode into over 3 million mainnet transactions in ~30 minutes.
In a debate about Algorand vs. Arbiritrum, Algorand CTO John Woods made the statement “You know, I can pull metrics out of the air too, whatever, 8 million transactions of the last week. My mom has four oranges, I don’t know.” He then goes on to describe Algorand’s layer 1 capacity and how it isn’t a battle of TVL, but a battle of blockchains and tech.
The Algorand community then latched on to the four oranges phrase, creating meme coins and meme projects referring to John Wood’s off-handed saying. But none of the coins and jokes stuck quite like Grzegorz Raczek’s ORA juicer. This is because Grzegorz’s idea had all of the key components to cause memeified community insanity:
- Grzegorz is a well-known builder in the space, founding Vestige.Fi and Chain_UI
- ORA is being launched fully decentralized, with juicing (sending algorand txns) the only way to earn ORA — Grzegorz himself will get nothing out of this.
- ORA has “purpose” to it — showing off just how much potential Algorand’s tech has.
- It’s memecoin season.
If you want to learn more, you can read my guide to mining ORA on Algorand here. Note that you will need a self-custody Algorand wallet to participate.