Telos EVM - TPS

Telos EVM differentiates itself from competition by not being a fork of the original Go Ethereum, like other EVMs, but is implemented from scratch and runs on top of EOSIO protocol. Telos web site boasts up to 10 000 TPS for their EVM. This high TPS figure is probably based on stress testing done on EOS Jungle testnet for EOSIO protocol. This TPS could be in theory possible if their compatibility server acting between the user and the EOSIO protocol would be also capable of handling 10 000 TPS.

I was able to chat briefly about this TPS with Telos Core Development team members Douglas Horn and Jesse Schulman. Jesse told they did some quick initial performance testing in September 2021 before launching their Telos EVM. The RPC servers back then had limited capacity and the number of the servers pushing the transactions to the Telos EVM was also lacking. The aim of the test was not to set TPS records and was cut short in the end. Despite these limitations they were able to sustain steady TPS of over 1600 TPS. Since the initial testing, Telos EVM has been optimized further. Douglas estimated the real-world usage sustainable TPS would be close to 6000 TPS. Unfortunately organizing these tests to match real-world usage is not a trivial matter, and thus probably might not happen in the nearby future. As this 6000 TPS is just an estimation and has not been yet proven, I just can’t use that number.

I think 1000 - 6000 TPS is quite fair estimate for now until we have more data on the subject. Even 1000 TPS still beats the EVM competition by quite a margin. It will be interesting to see if Telos team can reach and prove higher TPS counts in the future.

The future actually looks quite interesting as the Telos Core Development team is currently implementing second generation of their EVM, the Telos EVM 2.0. So it might be that we will not be getting better test data for Telos EVM, but the next results might already be about the second generation of their EVM.