In 2019 Radix achieved over 1 million transactions per second using Tempo, the predecessor to Radix’s Cerberus consensus protocol. In 2023, as part of the validation that went into publishing the Cerberus paper in the peer-reviewed Journal for Systems Research, tests showed that Cerberus comfortably exceeded 1 million transactions per second under multiple scenarios as per the below graphic.

What linear scalability looks like, with Cerberus processing over 1m transactions per second (TPS) in some scenarios

Tempo Demonstration 2019

The demonstration replayed the entire 10 years of Bitcoin transaction history with full transaction and signature validation, in under 30 minutes, on a network of 1,187 Google servers spread across 17 countries. This is the world record for decentralized ledgers and is more throughput than centralized and established payment processors like Alipay, Paypal, or WeChat.

The key innovation in Tempo enabling this kind of scale was the use of a pre-sharded data structure to group related state changes and separate unrelated state changes for parallel processing.

While Tempo achieved incredible scalability, it also became apparent that the way it conducted parallel consensus was not able to guarantee settlement finality in some possible circumstances.

As this was not good enough, we went back to the drawing board. These lessons formed the foundation for Cerberus, Radix’s unique consensus protocol, which retains Tempo’s pre-sharded data structure innovation.

You can read about the fully documented journey and lessons learned from Tempo in this article. For a more thorough overview of the previous tech iterations since 2013, you can read about Dan and Radix’s Tech Journey in this article.

Further reading:

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Is it true that Radix achieved over 1 million transactions per second?

Tempo Demonstration 2019