1. Which blockchain has the fastest transaction speed?
Solana has proven to be the fastest of the large blockchains, with its actual daily transaction volume (TPS) hitting an all-time high of 1,504 on April 6 this year amid the meme coin craze. This makes Solana 46 times faster than Ethereum and more than 5 times faster than Polygon, the highest TPS among Ethereum scaling solutions.
Despite being listed as the fastest blockchain for transaction speeds, Solana still only achieved 1.6% of its theoretical maximum speed of 65,000 TPS.
Source: CoinGecko
At the same time, a surge in transaction volume is causing network congestion, and it remains to be seen how quickly Solana can reach higher actual TPS following its upcoming upgrade.
2. The average speed of non-EVM blockchain is almost 4 times that of EVM
The second fastest blockchain is Sui, another non-EVM, which hit the highest real TPS of 854 in July 2023 as the on-chain game Sui 8192 gained popularity.
Other non-EVM blockchains with fast transaction speeds include TON at 175 TPS and Near Protocol at 118 TPS. Meanwhile, non-EVM blockchains with relatively low actual processing speeds are Aptos (49 TPS), Starknet (12 TPS), Bitcoin (11 TPS), and Thorchain (2 TPS).
In total, the average peak TPS for the eight non-EVM large blockchains is 284. In comparison, the average TPS for the 17 largest EVM and EVM-compatible blockchains is only 74. This makes non-EVM blockchains 3.9 times faster than EVM blockchains.
3. BSC and Polygon become the fastest EVM blockchain
Against the backdrop of a surge in inscription-driven on-chain activity, BNB Smart Chain (BSC)’s actual TPS reached 378 on December 7, 2023. This makes BSC the fastest blockchain in the EVM, although it ranks only third overall and achieves less than half the processing speed of Sui.
Likewise, the inscription craze brought Polygon’s actual TPS to 190 on November 16, 2023. As a result, Polygon is currently the fastest of the largest Ethereum scaling solutions, 8.4x faster than Ethereum itself, although Polygon falls further behind the top 3 fastest blockchains.
In other words, a single Ethereum scaling solution and Layer 2 has not yet been able to outperform other Layer 1s in terms of actual processing speed. This may be partially due to the lower number of on-chain transactions on Ethereum scaling solutions, resulting in slower TPS achieved by these blockchains.
The total actual TPS of Ethereum and its top ten scaling solutions is 500, and its combined processing speed is ahead of BSC, but still slower than Solana and Sui. In addition to Polygon, 4 other scaling solutions have proven to be faster than Ethereum (23 TPS), including Arbitrum (59 TPS), Linea (56 TPS), Base (37 TPS), and Mantle (25 TPS).
4. Almost all real TPS records were set within the past 12 months
24 of the 25 blockchains have experienced the highest actual TPS over the past year, ranging from Tron on June 12, 2023, to zkLink Nova as recently as May 13, 2024. Specifically, 12 achieved their highest actual TPS in 2023, and another 12 achieved their highest actual TPS in 2024. The only exception is Thorchain, which achieved the highest actual TPS in May 2022.
This shows that on-chain activity has been increasing and reaching higher levels in recent months, driven by speculation in Inscription and Memecoins.
5. Highest TPS in top blockchains
The largest blockchains, ranked from fastest to slowest by achieving the highest all-time daily average TPS:
Source: CoinGecko
This article is reprinted with permission from: "PANews"
Original article by Lim Yu Qian, CoinGecko
Compiled by: Wu Baht, Golden Finance
