Most people hear "parallel execution" and immediately think:
"More transactions = more speed."
But there's a problem
What happens when multiple transactions try to update the same state at the same time?
That's where concurrency control comes in
Imagine two transactions touching the same account balance
Transaction A: -$30
Transaction B: $50
If executed sequentially, the result is always correct
But in a parallel environment, both transactions could read the same starting balance and produce conflicting results
Without proper safeguards, speed comes at the cost of correctness
Blockchains solve this using concurrency control
The goal isn't just maximizing throughput
The goal is maximizing throughput while guaranteeing the same correctness as sequential execution
There are two main approaches:
→ Pessimistic Execution
→ Optimistic Execution
Pessimistic execution assumes conflicts will happen
Before execution begins, transactions declare what state they'll access.
If two transactions may conflict, one waits
Pros:
• Fewer failed executions
• No wasted computation
• Predictable outcomes
Cons:
• More waiting
• Reduced concurrency
Optimistic execution takes the opposite approach.
It assumes conflicts are rare
Transactions execute immediately and in parallel
Only after execution does the system check whether a conflict occurred
If it did?
The conflicting transaction gets rerun with the updated state
Pros:
• Maximum parallelism
• Lower latency
• Better resource utilization
Cons:
• More retries
• More wasted computation during conflicts
The interesting part:
Both approaches arrive at the exact same correct result
They simply pay the cost of uncertainty differently
Pessimistic systems pay before execution through delays
Optimistic systems pay after execution through retries
This tradeoff becomes even more important as blockchains scale
Read-heavy workloads, write-heavy workloads, account access patterns, and state contention all influence which model performs better
That's why concurrency control isn't just a technical detail
It's one of the core design decisions that determines a blockchain's performance characteristics
Rialo's visualizer does a great job showing these tradeoffs in action
Instead of reading about concurrency control in theory, you can actually watch transactions wait, execute, conflict, and rerun in real time
A great resource for anyone trying to understand how modern parallel-execution chains preserve both speed and correctness
The future of blockchain scalability isn't just about executing more transactions
It's about executing more transactions correctly