How to Scale to 30,000 Requests per Second. The Story Behind Usual's Seamless Airdrop
Usual Redefines Finance with a User-First Approach
Today’s stablecoins issuers often feel like traditional banks, accumulating large reserves while giving little back to users. Meanwhile, crypto tokenomics haven’t quite lived up to the promise, frequently favoring insiders over broader, long-term value creation.
Usual aims to change this narrative by redistributing 90% of value back to users. By putting ownership in the hands of its users, Usual Protocol ensures that value flows back to the community rather than concentrating at the top, paving the way for a fair and community-driven future for stablecoins and token-based finance.
The Usual Airdrop and Alchemy’s Challenge
For thousands of crypto users worldwide, December 18th wasn't just another Monday. It was the day Usual, the community-first stablecoin protocol, was about to reward its early supporters with a much-anticipated airdrop. The air was thick with excitement on crypto Twitter, Discord channels were buzzing, and users were ready at their keyboards.
Now picture this: 10 hours before the airdrop, Usual drops a bombshell—they crunched the numbers and realized they needed to scale their infrastructure. So, we ran the numbers too, cracked our knuckles, and said, "Challenge accepted."
Technical Requirements:
High traffic expectations: Peaks of 25,000 RPS (95% eth_calls)
Complex concurrency management: expected high concurrent eth_call requests to each node in our fleet
User experience: Ensuring zero downtime and smooth transactions for hundreds of thousands of claimants during the event
Delivering a Flawless Airdrop Experience, from Launch to Last Claim
“Alchemy was able to give us a near perfect availability, serving massive amounts of requests per second (30k requests per seconds was our peak, and we still had buffer 🚀🚀🚀), without any hiccups or downtime. And all on short notice!“
When Usual approached us about their upcoming airdrop, we knew standard infrastructure wouldn't cut it. Our team rapidly assembled a plan to scale our systems and support the massive influx of users for a sustained period of time. Here's how we turned a potential infrastructure challenge into a smooth experience.
Massive Throughput Increase
To support this massive throughput, Alchemy scaled Usual to 500,000 compute units per second and quadrupled their subgraph RPS, ensuring every user request would be processed without bottlenecks.
Infrastructure Optimization
We made special optimizations to our node setup to ensure that Usual’s traffic was distributed across our robust infrastructure.
Concurrent Request Handling
The team enhanced our eth_call handling capabilities and optimized node distribution. By increasing concurrent rate limits, we made sure the system could handle thousands of simultaneous requests accurately and efficiently.
Real-Time Support
Our engineering team monitored our systems throughout the event, ready to respond to any issues. This hands-on approach meant we could address concerns and optimize performance in real-time, ensuring a seamless experience for Usual and their 10s-of-thousands of users.
The Outcome: Numbers Tell the User Story
The scale of what happened during the Usual airdrop is best understood through the lens of real user activity. In the first hour alone, the system processed what would typically be a month's worth of traffic for many protocols.
Picture this: 38 million requests in a single hour, each representing a user trying to claim their share of the protocol. At its peak, over 200,000 users were attempting to claim at the exact same moment – imagine a virtual stadium of users, all clicking simultaneously, and everyone getting through. Here are some more numbers from the event!
Launch Hour Performance (11-12 UTC)
The busiest second: 30,000 requests – even more than estimated!
First hour of launch: 38 million requests, almost 1 billion CUs
36 hours later: 1 billion requests and 20 billion CUs
1 month post launch, Usual is crushing it: still seeing hundreds-of-millions of requests every day
Beyond the Numbers
Picture this: 38 million requests in a single hour, each representing a user trying to claim their share of the protocol. At its peak, over 200,000 users were attempting to claim at the exact same moment – imagine a virtual stadium of users, all clicking simultaneously, and everyone getting through. Here are some more numbers from the event!
The most telling statistic isn’t the volume; it's the thousands upon thousands of users who completed their claims without issues. This wasn't just an airdrop; it was a masterclass in user experience. While the technical numbers are impressive, the real story is about all of you who:
Didn't lose money on failed transactions
Didn’t have any frustrating timeouts or website crashes
Had instant response times
Experienced an overall smooth claiming process
This wasn't just about processing millions of requests with lightning speed. It was about making DeFi feel more reliable than traditional finance, and proving that with the right infrastructure, crypto can be accessible to everyone.
For the average user, infrastructure should be invisible. Like electricity or running water, it should just work. On December 18th, that's exactly what happened. While Alchemy's systems were processing astronomical numbers, users were experiencing something necessary and core to Alchemy: simplicity.
As Usual continues its mission to democratize stablecoins, this airdrop proved something important: with the right foundation, crypto can deliver on its promise of being accessible to all. The technical complexity that often serves as a barrier to entry can fade into the background, leaving users to focus on what matters – participating in a fair, functional financial system that works for everyone.
