Stellar Launches Project Thruput, Hits 7.02M Payments Per Second in Tests

The headline number is a testnet artifact, and Stellar's framing around multi-machine scaling signals that the real contest is architectural: whether throughput gains survive the jump from FutureNet to a production network with real validators and adversarial load. That distinction matters most for builders choosing a settlement rail and for networks competing on payment capacity claims, where benchmark comparisons are easy to cherry-pick. The open question is whether Project Thruput's execution model reaches mainnet without trading away the decentralization or finality guarantees that make a payment chain usable.