Virtualized Ethereum Network

Hello everyone ????????

I'm working on an internal system that uses solidity contracts to keep track of end user data. At the moment, the system uses Besu for the private network, however, we are starting to hit the TPS limit for our nodes. One solution we came up with is to make a "virtualized ethereum network" that uses a KV store instead of a blockchain for data management. Is there anything in the Ethereum spec that would require us to use a Merkle tree instead of a KV store?

Thanks