This week, Pi Squared, the team building Web3 infrastructure, announced its FastSet protocol has surpassed 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) with sub-100ms finality, setting a new standard for fast, verifiable, and decentralized settlement..
This performance was achieved on conventional hardware with 24-core CPUs and 256 GB of memory, making FastSet both high-performance and affordable. Unlike Solana and other high-throughput L1s and L2s that demand costly, specialized setups, Pi Squared said that FastSet validators can operate on machines that cost less than $1,000, radically lowering the barrier to participation and reinforcing FastSet’s commitment to broad decentralization.
FastSet is a modern, verifiable settlement protocol purpose-built for digital assets and AI at scale. Distributed and actor-based, FastSet is built to eliminate the fragmentation, latency, and trust bottlenecks plaguing today’s Web3 infrastructure. By enabling parallel, verifiable, and cross-chain settlement without bridges or centralized coordination, FastSet empowers apps, agents, and institutions to scale trustlessly and seamlessly.
Pi Squared held a public performance showcase on Aug. 12, featuring the FastSet Wallet, a lightweight interface enabling real-time interactions with the FastSet protocol. FastSet represents the latest step in Pi Squared’s mission to solve the fragmentation, trust, and scalability limitations of today’s blockchain infrastructure. This means that apps, agents, and protocols can interact across ecosystems without relying on bridges, centralized parties, or unprovable logic.
Key highlights include:
Lightning-fast transactions: 100,000+ TPS and <100ms finality enable real-time applications at scale for finance, gaming, and AI.
Verifiable by design: Every transaction is independently provable; no trust assumptions required.
Language-agnostic development: Build smart contracts in Python, Rust, JS, C++, and more—no ecosystem lock-in.
Parallel and scalable: FastSet processes independent claims concurrently, for maximum scale.
In the context of AI agents, FastSet enables micro-payments that are fast and cheap. It also allows interoperability between AI services across blockchains, enabling collaborative, cross-chain AI systems and agent-to-agent interaction with built-in cryptographic trust.
Across DeFi and institutional finance domains, FastSet delivers fast, secure cross-chain execution with ZK-proof protection against exploits, while also supporting atomic settlement to prevent partial trades and unlock cross-chain liquidity for CEXs, DEXs, and institutions. Verifiable transaction records also help meet regulatory compliance while enabling scalable, composable financial products.
Grigore Roșu, founder and CEO of Pi Squared, said, “FastSet is one of the most significant achievements across both my technical and academic career since I launched the K framework in 2003. Today, the old model of total ordering and brittle bridges is collapsing under the weight of its complexity. It brings real performance to decentralized systems – fast, decentralized, and verifiable by design. As a bonus for doing things right, it also offers the fastest and cheapest digital asset transfer system, including (micro) payments for AI agents.”
To help stress test and showcase the TPS, the team will soon launch a community game. Game participants can visit the wallet during a coordinated play window and click to generate 10–100 transactions per click, and earn points based on activity. Follow the Pi2 X account for game details and updates.
The announcement follows the recent launch of Pi Squared’s VSL Devnet, the first live environment of its Verifiable Settlement Layer, a decentralized network enabling transparent, programmable, and provable execution across chains, AI systems, and applications. Having raised $12.5 million in seed funding last year, Pi Squared is conducting an additional strategic raise, which will accelerate its mission to fix what today’s blockchain infrastructure can’t: scalability, fragmentation and trust.
