Espresso Cuts Mainnet Finality to 400 Milliseconds After Two Years

Espresso’s mainnet has produced about 31.7 million blocks in two years as its finality time fell from about 10 seconds at launch to roughly 400 milliseconds.

The network’s stated data throughput rose to 181 MB/s from 30 MB/s. Espresso designed the protocol as a base layer for other blockchains, without a virtual machine or smart contracts, and attributes the performance gains to that streamlined design.

Espresso says the 181 MB/s rate can support one million stablecoin transactions per second. The figure is a capacity estimate based on data volume and a roughly 180-byte simple token transfer; it is not a direct count of transactions completed each second on one chain.

A separate benchmark measured 181 MB/s across 100 validators while emulating network delays between global locations. It recorded a median settlement time of 778 milliseconds at peak capacity. The test did not measure live-mainnet throughput.