Layer N's Nord Engine Achieves 100,000+ TPS on Closed Testnet

January 30th, 2024 by Layer N

Layer N, the Ethereum L2 network backed by Founders Fund, today announced the results from its throughput testing, achieving a figure of 120,018 for transactions per second (TPS), 100x that of leading Ethereum scaling solutions. The testing was conducted on a closed testnet build that leverages Layer N’s new trading-optimized rollup engine - Nord Engine.

On Nord Engine, Layer N achieved 20,000 sustained TPS, 120,018 peak TPS, with EigenDA maintaining 3.0 megabytes per second (MBps). Nord Engine is the first app-specific rollup (ARN) introduced by Layer N within the StateNet, the term Layer N coined to represent a single shared state machine powered by a network of hundreds of custom and optimized rollups. Nord Engine was designed specifically to close the current gap between decentralized trading venues and centralized ones. Because of existing underlying compute and infrastructure constraints, decentralized trading venues have fewer features and worse latencies and throughput, typically by several orders of magnitude when compared to their centralized counterparts.

Nord Engine aims to not only close that gap, but also provide a product that can outperform the majority of centralized cryptocurrency exchanges in terms of performance. It is designed with a simple goal in mind: minimizing time-to-execution and maximizing overall throughput. Nord Engine can efficiently handle hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, high bursts of TPS without degraded performance, and sub-millisecond end-to-end latency. It also aims to enable something irreproducible in the centralized world: seamless composability with thousands of open and innovative on-chain financial applications through liquidity sharing, enabled by the StateNet architecture.

Dima Romanov, Layer N Co-Founder and CEO, said regarding today’s news: “After applications launch their Nord Engine instances, we plan on launching more optimized rollups including our own optimized version of the EVM, called N-EVM, that will be directly composable with Nord Engine. Exchanges deployed on Layer N will now be able to enable a whole ecosystem of developers to build hundreds of native integrations around them. Imagine if centralized exchanges we are all familiar with could allow developers to build applications directly on top of them. That’s what we are enabling.”

To achieve the TPS milestone, Layer N leverages EigenDA as its data availability layer, enabling users to securely store transaction data at a fraction of the cost while still leveraging Ethereum for security. Sreeram Kannan, Founder and CEO of Eigen Labs, commented on the partnership: “Layer N’s vision is exactly why we built EigenDA. Their team is pushing the limits of what’s possible in the decentralized space, and we’re super excited to be part of that journey. 2024 will be Ethereum’s year, and we’re extremely excited to bring to the community what we’ve been spending sleepless nights on building.”

Layer N’s broader goal is to enable a network of rollups on top of a shared sequencer and shared liquidity layer. The team envisions a world where thousands of rollups communicate seamlessly with each other, at sub-100ms latencies, without long withdrawal periods, and without the risk of conventional bridging, solving problems often associated with sharding and a bridge-centric architecture.

While the benchmarks were completed on a closed testnet instance, Layer N plans to open the testnet build to the public in the coming weeks. Follow Layer N on Twitter at @LayerN_Official to stay updated on the details of their public testnet launch.

About Layer N

Layer N is an Ethereum StateNet, a novel L2 designed as a network of custom and optimized rollups powered by a shared communication and liquidity layer. Layer N aims to expand what's possible to build on-chain by maximizing performance and UX, while enabling seamless communication, liquidity sharing, and composability between applications, without withdrawal periods and bridging risks.