Tatum Delivers 2.5X More Blockchain Throughput After Migrating Critical Infrastructure to Google Cloud

Tatum.io is one of the world’s pioneering blockchain infrastructure providers, powering applications for thousands of developers and enterprises since 2017. As adoption of blockchain tech accelerated, so did the demand for scale, reliability, and cost efficiency. To support this growth, Tatum turned to Google Cloud to modernize its infrastructure and unlock an unparalleled performance boost for its customers across over a 100 blockchain networks.

The Challenge

Going back to 2017, Tatum operated its blockchain infrastructure through bare-metal servers. This was, and surprisingly often still is, the go-to approach when businesses start thinking of blockchain infrastructure. While this setup provided a certain level of control, for Tatum it came with growing pains.

Scaling to meet developer demand, which often could triple or quadruple in a given month, meant procuring new machines to keep pace -  a process that could take days or even weeks. Hardware failures were another recurring headache: replacing faulty components could drag on for weeks, sometimes never being resolved at all, and in worst cases even RAID arrays got corrupted. Support response times were inconsistent and unpredictable, leaving the engineering team firefighting issues instead of focusing on product innovation.

“Every time demand spiked, we found ourselves fighting with infrastructure instead of focusing on our customers,” recalls Petr Vrba, CTO at Tatum. “Maintaining hardware, planning expansions, and recovering from failures was consuming far too much of our engineering time and honestly, our sleep as spikes could happen unpredictably.”

Even with Nomad and Ansible in place, scaling blockchain nodes still required manual intervention. That meant more developer hours lost to infrastructure babysitting, slower response to traffic surges, and cost planning that was anything but predictable.

The GCP Solution

To overcome these hurdles, and after careful deliberation, Tatum migrated critical parts of its infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). By adopting Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), the team replaced its legacy orchestration stack with containerized deployments that automatically scale based on demand. Persistent Disks with SSD storage added durability and enabled scheduled snapshots, strengthening the company’s data protection strategy. This was more of a gamechanger than expected.

“With Google Cloud, provisioning a new blockchain node is no longer a matter of days. It is literally minutes,” says Tomas Holcman, Infrastructure Architect at Tatum. “That agility is a game-changer for us and for the developers building on Tatum.”

The Ultimate Result

The migration quickly delivered measurable benefits. A benchmark on Bitcoin mainnet showed that Tatum could achieve the same reliability with just three Google Cloud instances compared to seven bare-metal servers previously. Provisioning times fell dramatically, and scaling blockchain nodes during peak demand became seamless.

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Perhaps most importantly, the migration improved the experience for developers. When TRON nodes faced throttling due to heavy use of computationally expensive methods, Tatum was able to deploy additional instances instantly, maintaining consistent response times for customers. The scaling was essentially seamless for customers - they didn’t notice a change.

“Our end users don’t care about the complexity behind the scenes - they just need fast, reliable, cost-effective infrastructure,” explains Dion Cornett, CEO at Tatum. “Google Cloud helps us deliver exactly that.”

Looking Ahead

The migration to Google Cloud has given Tatum a more reliable, scalable, and efficient infrastructure foundation. But this is only the beginning.

Tatum is now working closely with Google Cloud’s engineering and Web3 solutions teams to further optimize its stack - from fine-tuning container orchestration strategies to exploring new performance benchmarks for high-throughput blockchains. Ultimately, this will make Web3 more accessible through Google Cloud infrastructure and not only to Tatum users. 

This deeper cooperation reflects a long-term commitment. Tatum is now working to expand its presence within the Google Cloud Marketplace, making it easier for enterprises and developers to adopt blockchain solutions natively within their existing Google Cloud workflows.

By doubling down on Google Cloud, Tatum is solidifying its role as the go-to blockchain infrastructure provider within the Google Cloud ecosystem - and positioning itself to power the next generation of decentralized applications for years to come.