FAFO: Over 1 million TPS on a single node running EVM while still Merkleizing every block

TL;DR

FAFO is a novel blockchain transaction scheduler that reorders transactions for maximum concurrency, achieving over 1 million TPS on a single node while maintaining Merkleization for stateless validation.

Contribution

FAFO introduces a new transaction scheduling method that significantly increases throughput and integrates Merkleization for lightweight validation, addressing data contention issues.

Findings

Achieves over 1.1 million ETH transfers/sec on a single node.

Reduces execution costs by 91% compared to sharded solutions.

Supports Merkleized world state for stateless validation.

Abstract

Current blockchain execution throughput is limited by data contention, reducing execution layer parallelism. Fast Ahead-of-Formation Optimization (FAFO) is the first blockchain transaction scheduler to address this problem by reordering transactions before block formation for maximum concurrency. FAFO uses CPU-optimized cache-friendly Bloom filters to efficiently detect conflicts and schedule parallel transaction execution at high throughput and low overhead. We integrate the Rust EVM client (REVM) into FAFO and achieve over 1.1 million native ETH transfers per second and over half a million ERC20 transfers per second on a single node (Table 1), with 91% lower cost compared to state-of-the-art sharded execution. Unlike many other existing high throughput blockchain execution clients, FAFO uses QMDB to Merkleize world state after every block, enabling light clients and stateless validation for ZK-based vApps. FAFO scales with minimal synchronization overhead, scaling linearly with additional CPU resources until it fully exploits the maximum parallelism of the underlying transaction flow. FAFO proves that the high throughput necessary to support future decentralized applications can be achieved with a streamlined execution layer and innovations in blockchain transaction scheduler design. FAFO is open-sourced at https://github.com/LayerZero-Labs/fafo.