Decentralized applications (DApps), also known as Web3 applications, tend to be slower than their Web2 counterparts because they have to organize blockchain data from multiple sources.

Maxim Legg, CEO of Pangea — a decentralized data indexing solution — told Cointelegraph that data indexing will fix the speed bottleneck for Web3 applications.

Legg said data from RPC nodes, smart contracts, and other blockchain infrastructure can be hundreds of terabytes on high-throughput chains. Indexing is the process of organizing this raw blockchain data in a way that it can be effectively recalled later. The CEO told Cointelegraph:

"This is not something you want your developers to be dealing with. This is a real infrastructure problem. It can be solved once. It does not need to be solved individually by every single DApp developer."

Unfortunately, many Web3 developers are forced to build in-house indexing solutions, which are inefficient, overly complex, and time-consuming to develop, Legg said.

Lack of proper indexing is throttling DApp speeds — Pangea CEO image 0

Graphic illustrating factors that influence blockchain data latency. Source: Pangea

Related: Layer-2 networks need decentralized sequencers — Metis co-founder

Throughput set to massively increase

The higher the throughput of a blockchain — a figure measured in transactions per second (TPS) — the more onchain data that blockchain will generate that must be indexed by a DApp interacting with that chain.

In October, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined goals to scale the Ethereum base layer and its layer-2 scaling solutions to process over 100,000 transactions per second combined.

The goals outlined by Buterin in the Ethereum roadmap also involved increasing interoperability between Ethereum and its many layer-2 networks.

StarkWare CEO Ben Sasson told Cointelegraph at the DevCon 2024 conference that Starknet — an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution — would 4x its TPS within three months and rival the Solana network’s throughput.

Layer-2 solution ZKsync is also eyeing higher throughput as part of its goals. According to the project roadmap, the developers want ZKsync to increase throughput to 10,000 TPS by 2025 and reduce transaction fees to as low as $0.0001.

Solana’s non-voting throughput is currently in the 800 to 1,050 TPS range. Solana’s high-throughput and monolithic design features have attracted developer attention — ranking it as the top ecosystem for development in 2024.

Magazine: Is measuring blockchain transactions per second (TPS) stupid in 2024? Big Questions