We demonstrated the Frankendancer pipeline last year hitting a million transactions per second—pretty impressive numbers on paper. But here's the thing: if the rest of your network can't actually handle that speed, you've got a bottleneck problem. The chain might theoretically achieve those numbers, but you're only as fast as your slowest component. Building a genuinely high-performance, high-throughput blockchain isn't just about pushing TPS numbers in isolation. You need the entire system working in concert—consensus mechanisms, validator infrastructure, data propagation, everything has to be synchronized. Otherwise you're just creating a performance illusion.