As before today the word blocking was considered as a synonym of bad performance. If we wanted to achieve performance, we had to do reactive programming, which is hard to write, read and debug. But with the introduction of Virtual Threads first in experimental Project Loom and now in JDK19, the game has changed dramatically. Helidon Nima is the first microservices framework fully based on Virtual Threads which can deliver performance equal or even higher than that achieved with reactive paradigm. In this talk I talk about this framework as well as about the benefits and challenges of using this development paradigm compared to reactive approach, with real live demos.