The CertiK 15.52M TPS verification on Qubic – has anyone actually looked into what they verified and how?

CertiK published an independent verification of Qubic's mainnet throughput at 15.52 million transactions per second. That number sounds implausible by most blockchain standards so I spent some time understanding what was actually measured.

The architecture context that makes it make sense: Qubic runs on bare metal hardware with no virtual machine layer. Most blockchains – including Ethereum – run smart contracts through an EVM which adds overhead at every execution step. Qubic's contracts execute directly on hardware. The tick-based consensus system also eliminates block propagation delays.

The CertiK verification was on live mainnet, not a testnet or benchmark environment. The measurement methodology is published.

My question for people who follow performance metrics closely: does the bare metal execution explanation actually hold up technically? And does the TPS number matter if the network's smart contract ecosystem is still early?