“Blockchain Developers Are Solving Problems Other Industries Tackled Decades Ago” — Brandon Vrooman on What Gaming Teaches Crypto

In 2025, blockchain infrastructure reached unprecedented milestones. At peak moments, new networks were processing 100,000 transactions per second, matching speeds of traditional payment systems. 

But this explosive growth demands more than just better code. It requires engineers who understand how to build high-performance systems that millions of people can actually use. Brandon Vrooman's career path is unusual for crypto: before building blockchain infrastructure that processes over 21,000 transactions per second at Fuel Labs, he spent years optimizing video games at Ubisoft, making sure they ran smoothly for millions of players. 

That experience taught him how to build systems that don't just work in theory but handle massive real-world usage, and now he applies these lessons to blockchain. In this interview, he explains how gaming industry practices for managing performance and reliability translate directly to the crypto industry's biggest challenges.

Your career path appears to be unusual for the blockchain industry. What are the most important lessons from your background in game development that you were able to apply to blockchain later?

The most important lesson from game development is that making code faster is only one of the aspects of performance optimization. You also need to design systems that will maintain performance under real-world conditions. While you may focus on making the system work efficiently under average conditions, optimizing for the average case isn't enough. You have to design for the worst case, which means, for example, that the game will maintain a consistent frame rate no matter what players decide to do. What really translates to blockchain is the approach to data-oriented design and memory management. When you are processing thousands of transactions per second, the way you structure your data and your memory access becomes critical. Some blockchain engineers who come from a web development background aren't used to these constraints, so they miss optimization opportunities.

Let's talk about these optimization opportunities in more detail. In gaming, millions of polygons are rendered with framerates like 60 frames per second. In blockchain, the goal is similar: for a network to scale up, it must be able to process thousands of transactions per second. What are the actual technical parallels between these challenges?

The fundamental parallel is that both require consistent, predictable performance under variable load. If a game is rendered at 60 FPS, you have a strict 16-millisecond budget to render each frame, or the players will notice the game freezing or stuttering. Similarly, in blockchain, inconsistent processing hurts the entire network. Consequently, you need to build systems that perform efficiently under variable load. Another useful parallel is the combination of batching operations and parallel processing. Often, the key to improving performance is in how you structure your operations to use the computing power at hand in the most efficient way.

At Fuel Labs, you've built infrastructure that serves as one of the fastest and cheapest Layer 2 solutions, achieving over 21,000 transactions per second per CPU core with transaction fees around $0.0002. What specific techniques or lessons from other industries helped you achieve those numbers?

We focused on optimizing for the actual workload patterns that blockchains generate, rather than just implementing textbook algorithms. For instance, that meant understanding the crucial role of Merkle Trees, algorithms that are fundamental to blockchain security. They provide cryptographic verification for transactions, smart contract state, and other critical data. The problem is that Merkle tree verification is computationally expensive, and because it's used everywhere in blockchain execution, it can become a significant performance bottleneck. Developing a new Merkle Tree implementation increased performance significantly, optimizing computations and making them more efficient.

Your contributions to building more efficient blockchain infrastructure aren't limited to your work at Fuel Labs. Later, at ChainML, you built the Theoriq protocol's infrastructure, which currently handles over 100,000 users and 2 million requests daily. How do you handle the development of high-load systems with hundreds of thousands of users and unpredictable load spikes?

The key is designing for unpredictability from the start. The Theoriq protocol is used for AI agent coordination, and AI agents don't generate steady traffic, often producing bursts of activity instead. As a result, you have to design for peak load while keeping costs reasonable during normal operation. During development, we implemented multiple prototypical versions, testing each against realistic load patterns. The testnet validation with hundreds of thousands of participants was crucial, as it exposed real-world usage patterns and edge cases that were difficult to anticipate in controlled testing.

You’ve contributed to shipping products used by hundreds of thousands of end users, such as AAA videogames at Ubisoft and blockchain infrastructure at Fuel Labs and ChainML. Recently, you were invited to judge the "Cases & Faces" International Business Award, where you evaluated innovative products. How does your definition of "production-ready" differ from what you often see in crypto projects?

"Production-ready" means the system works reliably when real users depend on it, not just in controlled demos, but in real conditions, taking users' behavior, peak loads and hardware specifics into account. The standards commonly accepted in high-performance gaming create a different picture in comparison to what I often see in crypto, where projects sometimes launch with impressive demos but haven't been battle-tested at scale with real users and real money at stake.

Looking forward, do you think blockchain needs more engineers with backgrounds outside of blockchain-native development?

Currently, blockchain developers are often trying to solve problems that other industries have tackled decades ago, such as high-frequency transaction processing, performance optimization or handling the load of millions of concurrent users. Industries like gaming, financial trading systems and large-scale web services learned hard lessons about what works at scale and what doesn't, and the culture of performance engineering and production discipline of these industries is definitely something blockchain developers would benefit from.