In Blockchain, performance improvements often resemble seasoning—too little makes it hard to swallow, while too much can make you feel "stuffed." The Octane upgrade of Avalanche @avax launched in April empowers validators with the ability to dynamically adjust target Gas, raising their goal from 1.6 million gas/second to 2.1 million, resulting in a throughput rise of over 30%, making it a "booster" among EVM chains.

This not only means that more transactions can be processed quickly, but user fees are also expected to decrease; however, the pressure on node hardware and the network is also rising simultaneously. The reassuring thing is that the Avalanche team ensures network stability by closely monitoring Block validation times, storage rise, and communication between validators. Interestingly, the storage requirements brought by unit gas have actually decreased, demonstrating the depth and efficiency of protocol optimization.

What is even more exciting is that the future integration of Streaming Asynchronous Execution (SAE) and Firewood database will completely liberate execution from the constraints of consensus, pushing throughput capacity to new heights. This architectural innovation may become a new paradigm for on-chain performance enhancement.

However, as the capacity of the blockchain continues to expand, are we inadvertently increasing the resource threshold for nodes? How can we find a balance between the ideal of decentralization and the reality of high performance? This is not only a challenge for Avalanche but also a common proposition for the entire public chain ecosystem.

I believe that Avalanche's recent upgrade is not only a technological iteration but also a profound exploration of the future on-chain economic model. It reminds us that performance improvement is not just a numerical rise but also a test of ecological resilience and sustainability.