Stellar Unveils Fee-Free Network Processing 7 Million Payments per Second

The headline number is striking, but the disclosure itself is the real story: a single-validator, eight-machine benchmark is a controlled lab result, not evidence of live network behavior under adversarial or decentralized conditions. That distinction matters most for payment-focused chains and the builders weighing Stellar against rivals on throughput claims. The absence of a mainnet timeline or further testing detail leaves the central question open: whether this performance holds once validators are distributed and the network faces real-world load.