Stellar (XLM) previews Project Thruput, a fee-free compute model

News

Stellar (XLM) says Project Thruput is a technology preview on FutureNet that reached 7.02 million payments per second in benchmarks.

Stellar (XLM) said on 2026-10-28 that it is previewing Project Thruput, a new execution model it says can expand blockchain compute by adding machines rather than rationing throughput through transaction order or per-transaction fees. In benchmark results cited by the Stellar Development Foundation, execution capacity inside a single validator rose from 1.18 million payments per second on one machine to 7.02 million on eight machines.

Evidence and context

According to the foundation’s announcement published on 2026-10-28, Project Thruput is live on FutureNet as a technology preview with open-source code, white papers and reproducible benchmarks. The model is designed to let transactions start from the same ledger snapshot and execute side by side, even when they touch the same state, with compatible changes merged at commit time. Stellar said the approach differs from traditional blockchain ordering models that can force conflicting transactions to wait in line, leaving additional hardware underused.

The foundation said the benchmark figures measure execution capacity within a single validator, not consensus-inclusive or end-to-end network throughput. It said the tests used real RV32 ERC-20 transfers, including execution, signature checks and block open-to-commit work in Project Thruput’s core execution engine, with each figure taken as the median of three runs on AWS r8a.16xl instances. The source material also says the benchmark scenario involved payments moving among 100 accounts under heavy contention.

Stellar said Project Thruput has no per-transaction fees, although gas still measures and caps each transaction’s execution. When demand exceeds capacity, the foundation said an account’s share of scheduling capacity is determined by its unlocked native-token balance, and that storage requires a refundable token lock. The announcement frames the system as a way to make free smart contract execution practical at scale, but it does not provide a mainnet rollout date or indicate that Project Thruput is already a deployed Stellar network upgrade.

Secondary reports dated 2026-10-28 and 2026-10-29 echoed the same benchmark results and described Project Thruput as fee-free and live on FutureNet, but the official technical scope in the supplied material remains that of a technology preview. The materials also note that the figures are validator-level execution benchmarks rather than demonstrated network-wide performance, so the results should not be read as proof of mainnet capacity.