“From Bottlenecks to Breakthroughs : Scaling a Blockchain from 40 to 1,800 TPS with Rust"

Blockchain technology can be a powerful solution in fintech—until you hit a major performance wall. Our team at CloudWalk faced a near-catastrophe when our system plateaued at 40 transactions per second, putting millions of users at risk. In this talk, I’ll share how we overhauled our entire infrastructure with Rust, RocksDB, and Inferno, driving a 45× improvement in throughput to reach 1,800 TPS.

We’ll explore how we identified critical bottlenecks with Inferno, why we chose Rust for a full-scale rewrite, and how we leveraged RocksDB to handle massive transaction volumes. I’ll also discuss how we developed a custom consensus mechanism suited for our needs and the intense challenges of “changing the tires while the plane is flying.” Whether you’re building fintech solutions, scaling Rust applications, or just curious about real-world performance engineering, this session will provide actionable insights on achieving high throughput without sacrificing reliability.

I am the Head of Engineering and interim CTO at CloudWalk (InfinitePay), a fintech serving millions of users in Brazil. My primary focus is building high-throughput financial systems with Rust, a language I’ve been using intensively for over four years. In that time, I’ve tackled large-scale performance challenges—including rewriting our blockchain layer, developing custom consensus mechanisms, and integrating RocksDB—to ensure that our applications can scale reliably. Beyond coding, I enjoy guiding teams through high-stakes projects where the stakes (and the TPS) are always rising!