Blockchain Performance No Longer Enough for Financial Markets

a16z researchers argue that performance alone is not enough for financial markets to adopt blockchains on a global scale.

The document identifies three critical requirements that networks must meet: predictable and censorship-resistant inclusion, clear ordering rules, and pre-execution privacy.

a16z notes that aggregate throughput grew more than 100 times over five years, but this progress does not guarantee the conditions that institutional markets require.

The ability to process transactions at volume was for years the main obstacle for onchain financial applications. Now that production systems are already processing tens of thousands of transactions per second, the debate has shifted toward meeting these more difficult requirements.