Transaction fees and TPS, how does Starcoin face the challenge of application explosion?

5 min readDec 20, 2024

As the crypto market continues to heat up, Web3 applications are also growing rapidly. According to Coingecko statistics, there are currently more than 10,000 applications included, including a large number of applications that have just been launched this year. The explosion of applications will inevitably challenge the public chain infrastructure. The pursuit of lower transaction fees and higher TPS will determine the survival of the public chain in this round of competition. As an emerging public chain project in the Move ecosystem, Starcoin has demonstrated unique advantages in these two aspects. Its design concept and technical architecture provide new possibilities for the expansion of blockchain applications.

1. Low transaction fees: solving the problem of popularity

The popularization of blockchain faces multiple challenges, the most prominent of which is the high transaction fees. On mainstream public chains such as Ethereum, as network congestion intensifies, transaction fees soar, bringing huge economic pressure to developers and users. Therefore, Ethereum is also nicknamed the noble public chain. For scenarios such as small payments, in-game item transactions, and NFT transactions that require frequent transactions, high transaction fees are undoubtedly a “stumbling block” to their expansion, which is also one of the main reasons why Ethereum has gradually declined in recent years.

For public chains, the lower the gas fee, the better. So how low should it be to be generally accepted by users? For this question, we can compare the interaction costs in the Web2 ecosystem. For high-frequency in-game transactions, the cost needs to be imperceptible. Users do not need to take gas costs into account when buying props or selling equipment. The same is true for transactions. For transactions to be truly popular, the cost of each transaction should be less than $0.01 for buying a cup of coffee or sending a red envelope to be truly imperceptible. Only when the transaction fee is really low will more users really consider using Web3 applications.

Now we see that Ethereum and its L2 fees are still quite high. The lowest Optimism costs $0.18, and the Ethereum mainnet costs $5.48 when it is not congested. This is obviously unacceptable.

Starcoin took low transaction fees as one of its core goals at the beginning of its design. By optimizing the consensus mechanism and improving blockchain efficiency, Starcoin has significantly reduced transaction costs. In the Starcoin ecosystem, both ordinary users and developers can enjoy transactions as low as a few cents, which makes it an ideal choice for large-scale applications. Especially in the fields of decentralized finance (DeFi), NFTs, and games, low transaction fees allow users and developers to use blockchain technology more efficiently, promoting the rapid growth of Web3 applications.

2. High TPS: Improve user experience and application carrying capacity

With the enrichment of blockchain application scenarios, user needs are also increasing, especially in the financial, gaming, and social fields with huge transaction volumes, high TPS has become an indispensable requirement. Traditional public chains, such as Ethereum, although they have powerful smart contracts and decentralized features, as the network load increases, their TPS ceiling has become a bottleneck and cannot meet the needs of large-scale applications.
Starcoin2.0 significantly improves the network’s TPS by optimizing the consensus mechanism and parallel execution engine, up to 130,000 TPS, ensuring that the network can still run smoothly under high concurrency. FlexiDAG and TurboSTM are mentioned here.

FlexiDAG improves consensus: dynamically adjusts block time, difficulty and block rewards, speeds up block generation, shortens transaction confirmation time, and greatly improves Starcoin’s performance and system efficiency.
TurboSTM parallel processing: introduces multi-threaded processing capabilities to achieve more efficient transaction execution.

This allows Starcoin to be at ease when dealing with application ecosystem interactions. Whether it is a DeFi platform, NFT market or blockchain game, Starcoin can provide fast transaction confirmation, greatly improving the user experience. At the same time, high TPS also provides stronger support for the decentralized application of the public chain, avoiding the potential security risks caused by “over-concentration”.

3. Ecological expansion: support for multi-scenario applications

With the rapid development of Web3, the scenarios and needs of decentralized applications are becoming more and more extensive. Starcoin’s technical advantages enable it to perform well in a variety of application scenarios. Whether it is decentralized finance (DeFi), decentralized social platforms, NFT markets, or blockchain games, Starcoin can provide highly competitive infrastructure support.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi): Low fees and high TPS ensure the high-frequency transactions and fast settlement requirements in DeFi applications, and users do not need to worry about the operational experience being affected by transaction delays or high fees.
NFT market: With the popularity of NFT, Starcoin can provide a fast and low-cost NFT transaction experience, support a large number of creators and users to participate, and promote the growth of digital art and creative economy.
Blockchain games: Asset transactions and interactions between players in games are frequent and have high real-time requirements. Starcoin’s high TPS and low fees provide perfect technical support for blockchain games and enhance the player’s gaming experience.
Social scenarios: Users participate in comments, likes, and transfers of personal accounts require frequent interactions. Starcoin can perfectly fit the growth of social applications.

4. Future Outlook: Adapting to the Growth of Web3 and Decentralized Applications

With the vigorous development of Web3 and decentralized applications, Starcoin is constantly optimizing its technical framework and infrastructure to further improve the performance and security of the network. Starcoin’s goal is not only to become an infrastructure public chain, but also to become the core driving force of the Web3 ecosystem through technological innovation and ecological construction.

In the future, Starcoin will continue to strengthen cooperation with developers and users to promote the birth of more innovative applications. Especially in the fields of decentralized finance, NFT and digital identity, Starcoin will provide more efficient, secure and low-cost blockchain solutions for global users to meet the explosion of user demand under the Web3 wave.

Summary

With the advantages of low transaction fees and high TPS, Starcoin has successfully catered to the growing demand of current blockchain application scenarios and has become an important part of the Web3 ecosystem. In the future, with the continuous evolution of its technology and the continuous expansion of its ecology, Starcoin is expected to provide more developers and users with efficient and convenient blockchain services worldwide, and promote the popularization and development of decentralized applications.

About Starcoin

Starcoin provides the utmost security from the origin via its enhanced PoW consensus and Secure smart contract, using the language of Move. Through layered and flexible interoperability, it optimizes the building of ecosystems such as DeFi, NFTs, Gaming, etc., with higher efficiency and convenience. This process redefines value by empowering every participant in the ecosystem to enjoy the multiplication of values.

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