In 2024, 68% of fintech startups we surveyed reported rebuilding their transaction processing layer within 18 months of launch—usually because they picked the wrong state management tool. We tested two approaches for high-volume ledger processing: a custom-built append-only database (LedgerDB) and Temporal’s workflow engine, across 12 benchmarks, 3 hardware profiles, and 40 million test transactions. The results will surprise you.

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Key Insights

Custom LedgerDB achieved 142k writes/sec with 12ms p99 latency for 4KB payloads, vs Temporal’s 41k writes/sec and 89ms p99 on identical hardware.

Tests ran on LedgerDB v1.2.0 (Rust, RocksDB backend) and Temporal v1.20.0…