Somnia Explorer on Blockscout: Scaling to One Million TPS
Somnia, an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain, is redefining network performance with bursts of up to one million transactions per second (TPS) and sub-second finality. During its testnet phase, the network consistently processed up to 103 million transactions per day, with all data indexed and made available to users within seconds.
About the Project
To support such unprecedented throughput, Somnia required a blockchain explorer capable of handling massive ingestion, indexing, and real-time data serving. Protofire partnered with the Somnia team to launch and optimize the Somnia Testnet Explorer, ensuring both reliability and scalability on one of the fastest blockchain networks in existence.
During early deployment and testing, several critical bottlenecks became apparent:
- Extreme Transaction Load: Handling 1,000,000 TPS while exposing a reliable API for developers and partners.
- Explorer Features Under Stress: Maintaining contract verification, transaction/block search, and analytics at scale.
- Database Performance: A rapidly growing Postgres database (19+ TB, 2B+ rows) led to query slowdowns and indexing delays.
- Scalability & Reliability: Default infrastructure configurations were insufficient for Somnia’s high-throughput environment.
These challenges threatened the explorer’s ability to keep pace with Somnia’s network activity and to provide the user experience expected from a next-generation blockchain.
Protofire leveraged its infrastructure expertise and Blockscout’s open-source foundation to deliver a tailored solution:
- Database Optimization
- Tuned Postgres for large-scale ingestion, memory handling, and vacuum thresholds.
- Added critical indexes and optimized queries to fit Somnia’s unique workload.
- Infrastructure Scaling
- Deployed a 96-core, 1 TB RAM, 100+ TB storage machine with containerized orchestration.
- Adjusted batch sizes and concurrency levels for high-throughput indexing.
- Blockscout Enhancements
- Maintained core explorer functions such as contract verification, address lookups, and analytics.
- Ensured near real-time responsiveness despite unprecedented transaction volumes.
Together, these improvements enabled Somnia’s explorer to operate reliably at a scale rarely seen in the blockchain industry.
Protofire’s collaboration with Somnia transformed the explorer from a standard deployment into an infrastructure capable of sustaining one of the fastest networks in Web3. The improvements are visible across several measurable dimensions:
- Transaction Throughput: The explorer successfully processed and indexed up to 103 million transactions in a single day, providing users and developers with real-time access to network data even during peak activity.
- Database Stability: Optimizations allowed Postgres to handle a dataset exceeding 2 billion rows without slowing down queries or indexing, ensuring consistent performance under extreme load.
- Real-Time Responsiveness: Despite handling record-breaking throughput, the explorer maintained near-instantaneous responses for block searches, contract lookups, and transaction queries.
- Scalability: The upgraded infrastructure is not only stable under today’s conditions but is also engineered to grow alongside Somnia’s ecosystem, accommodating future increases in adoption and usage.
These improvements established the Somnia Explorer as a reliable entry point for one of the world’s fastest blockchains, enabling both developers and end-users to engage with the network at scale without compromising performance.
For developers, institutions, and end-users, the enhanced explorer provides critical advantages that go beyond visibility:
- Reliable Analytics: Developers and researchers can trust the accuracy of transaction and block data at a massive scale, enabling deeper insights and more reliable dApp performance monitoring.
- Robust API Access: A stable and well-optimized API ensures that partner protocols and ecosystem tools can integrate seamlessly with Somnia, accelerating time-to-market for new applications.
- Performance at Scale: By proving that infrastructure can keep up with 1M TPS, Somnia sets a new benchmark for L1 scalability, giving projects the confidence that their applications can grow without hitting performance ceilings.
- Future-Ready Infrastructure: The explorer’s resilience assures that as Somnia expands — in users, projects, and transaction volumes — the core data services will remain reliable, secure, and developer-friendly.
Together, these benefits position Somnia as a network where both builders and institutions can innovate confidently, knowing that the supporting infrastructure can meet the demands of next-generation blockchain applications.
Somnia is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain designed to achieve bursts of up to one million transactions per second with sub-second finality. By combining high throughput with developer-friendly tooling, Somnia aims to set new standards for scalability, interoperability, and user experience in Web3.