When the testnet launched, the gas limit was set at 300 million. The block frequency was at "only" 1 second.

On Valentine's day, Feb 14, 2025

- The gas limit was reduced to 150 M

- The block frequency was doubled from 1 to 2 blocks per second

- Finally, on Feb 19th, eager Monads came crawling out of the woodworks to participate in history.

The chart above categorizes the data based on these three time intervals. It is recommended that you play with the little dots on the legend.

You will see a strong positive correlation in all three timeframes

With all the dots on, it i hard to ascertain what is going on with the public testnet, because of the outliers, from the closed, block-a-second days. Notice how that outlier kind of lines up with the other data points, even though it is at a fair distance.

Turn the "before" dot off and you see a very strong linear correlation in both cases, although those last few days of the private testnet show a much sharper slope. I am guessing this is more due to the nature of the contracts being run than the limit/ frequency, but that is just a guess. Damn it Jim I'm an analyst not a dev! (Old school Star Trek humor).

Isolating on the public testnet, we see a very healthy looking cluster of dots (each dot is hourly TPS). We see that block utilization rates are surpassing 25%.

Two things to keep in mind.

- This chart is not showing progress over time

- Needles to say (though I feel I have to say it anyway), this relationship doesn't stay linear as the utilization rate increases, since now the problem isn't sitting around waiting for a transaction to happen, but the kinds of problems that present themselves on a busy blockchain! With the kind of scaling that Monad seems to provide, maybe this won't be a problem!

potmo