Breaking the Sound Barrier of Blockchain: How Ormi Enabled Somnia’s One Million TPS

Somnia breaks the sound barrier of blockchain: First to 1 million TPS

On October 14, 1947, the Bell X-1 broke the speed of sound, reaching Mach 1.06—the first time a human flew faster than the speed of sound.

Just as the Bell X-1 achieved the “supersonic feat” in aviation that most thought impossible—or even dangerous—Somnia has done the same in blockchain performance, breaking the sound barrier.

Somnia is the fastest blockchain, reaching a record speed of one million transactions per second. One million TPS may sound like an abstract number to casual readers, but it represents a monumental milestone in blockchain performance history: the first time a blockchain has ever clocked one million TPS.

To make the abstract number more concrete, below is a benchmark comparison against the database systems that power the entire internet, such as Postgres:

In other words, Somnia is five times faster than Postgres. This means Somnia enables Web3 to operate five times faster than today’s traditional web. Real-time applications that cannot tolerate even a 100 ms delay—such as high-frequency trading and gaming can now offer a smooth, lag-free native experience on Web3 through Somnia, at speeds surpassing those of the traditional web.

For the first time in blockchain history, real-world, real-time applications can deliver a truly native experience without lag.

A supersonic chain is nothing without a supersonic backend

The innovation brought by Somnia has created a significant gap for indexing infrastructure providers to fill—namely, to catch up to Somnia’s one million TPS. One million TPS on the Somnia blockchain measures how fast data can be written to the chain, but for applications to stay real-time, that same volume must also be indexed and delivered to frontends just as quickly.

Indexing services are the backbone of blockchain applications, and if they can’t keep up, users are left with stale data, financial risk, and sluggish interfaces.

In short, even the fastest chain will feel slow if its indexing and data infrastructure can’t keep up...

Enter Ormi, the fastest subgraph and blockchain data platform that can actually meet the stringent requirement of one million TPS

Ormi serves Somnia with both smart contract–centric indexing through its 0xGraph product and account-centric indexing through its 0xAPI product, addressing Somnia’s multi-faceted needs. Together, these power its flagship dApps, games, and portfolio-based products.

Not all blockchain indexing platforms are designed to handle high-throughput traffic—especially in terms of performance and latency. With Somnia pushing one million TPS, indexing providers now face a new challenge and it will quickly become clear which ones can keep up and which ones can’t.

When other subgraph or indexing providers struggled on Somnia—for example, with on-chain quests or decentralized exchanges—subgraphs fell behind the chain head, financial transactions were dropped, and user interfaces lagged. In those moments, teams turned to Ormi for help, and Ormi successfully delivered on their real-time application requirements.

How did Ormi power one million TPS while other providers struggled

Ormi is purpose-built for crypto data, combining bare-metal clusters for ultra-high-throughput workflows such as transactional databases, with cloud architecture where reliability is critical. This hybrid design allows Ormi to scale elastically, meeting Somnia’s stringent requirements by instantly scaling up or out as workloads grow.

Furthermore, the transactional database that interacts with Somnia’s fast chain is fine-tuned and optimized for Somnia-specific workflows and transactions, ensuring zero latency in indexing.

Lastly, for applications that require extreme performance, Ormi allocates dedicated indexing resources to specific indexing processes (e.g., Quickswap). This provides an additional performance boost, enabling speeds that scale to meet Somnia’s one million TPS requirement.

By combining the following three pillars, Ormi delivers the most performant indexing platform:

• Hybrid architecture of bare-metal and cloud, purpose-built for blockchain workflows
• Fine-tuned transactional database optimized to meet stringent timing requirements
• Isolated indexing processes with performance mode to supercharge mission-critical applications

Projects highlight: Real-time apps that require Somnia and Ormi's high-performance edge

Uprising Labs – AAA game publisher: Maelstrom, Mask of the Void (available on Steam)
QuickSwap – The largest DEX on Polygon

Standard – Fully on-chain CLOB (central limit order book)

SparkBall – Multiplayer game exploring prediction-market monetization

Uprising Labs

Uprising Labs is a leading game publisher bringing mid-to-hardcore PC and console games to Web3. With AAA titles like Maelstrom and Mask of the Void brought on-chain, they rely on Somnia’s real-time capacity and Ormi’s high-performance indexing to deliver seamless, lag-free gameplay showcasing the power of on-chain gaming at scale.

QuickSwap

QuickSwap is the largest decentralized exchange (DEX) on Polygon, processing billions of dollars in transaction volume. Known for its ability to handle high-performance, high-throughput decentralized trading, QuickSwap turned to Somnia for its unprecedented one million TPS capacity. On Somnia, Ormi’s subgraph powers QuickSwap’s live trading dashboard, enabling real-time DeFi at scale.

Standard

Standard is the first verified, fully onchain central limit orderbook(CLOB) DEX protocol to solve liquidity fragmentation across blockchains and bring true interoperability in internet of values. Standard strives to be decentralized Binance and Coinbase, and built stablecoin on top of it to form the next standard of finance.

Sparkball

Sparkball is a 4v4 “sports brawler” where quirky heroes battle and score goals, blending the chaos of League of Legends with the intensity of Rocket League. Fast, strategic, and addictive, it hooks you with its mix of brawling and ball control, then keeps you chasing mastery.

About Somnia

Somnia is the fastest, most cost-effective EVM Layer-1 blockchain, capable of processing over 1 million transactions per second with sub-second finality and sub-cent fees. Somnia’s performance enables real-time, fully onchain experiences that go beyond financial applications. It’s the ideal foundation for building large-scale games, social platforms, AI-powered applications and much more.

About Ormi

Ormi is the next-generation data layer for Web3, purpose-built for real-time, high-throughput applications like DeFi, gaming, wallets, and on-chain infrastructure. Its hybrid architecture ensures sub-second latency and up to 4,000 RPS for live subgraph indexing, sub-10ms responses across 100+ API schemas, and a powerful SQL engine for historical and AI-ready data.

With 99.9% uptime and deployments across ecosystems representing $50B+ in TVL and $100B+ in annual transaction volume, Ormi is trusted to power the most demanding production environments without throttling or delay.