Solana is one of the fastest and most efficient blockchains on the market today. This has attracted a number of promising projects to build on Solana, and the platform has also attracted many users that have been priced out of Ethereum due to its high transaction fees.
So, how fast is Solana exactly? Solana is handling over 5,000 transactions per second in real-world scenarios, but has reached as high as 65,000 TPS during testing.
In this article, we will be taking at the Solana TPS figures and how Solana stacks up against other popular blockchains in terms of performance. We will also be looking at some future developments that will improve the scalability of Solana.
What is Solana?
Solana is a blockchain platform with support for smart contracts. The project was founded in 2017 by software engineer Anatoly Yakovenko. Thanks to its high throughput and low costs, Solana is positioning itself as the underlying infrastructure for blockchain-based applications that are targeting a large userbase or need to handle a large number of transactions in a short period of time (for example, high-performance decentralized crypto exchanges).
In contrast to Ethereum, which is meant to scale through layer 2 solutions, Solana is designed to reach sufficient scalability at its base layer. Solana implements a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism and enhances it through a Proof-of-History timestamping function.
Solana is already very scalable, especially when compared to other blockchains available today. You’ll be paying less than $0.001 per transaction, and you can expect it to be completed in about 5 seconds. In fact, Solana is one of the cheapest cryptocurrencies to transfer today.
While Solana provides a very fast and low-cost alternative to Ethereum, the network has struggled with reliability. Solana has seen outages much more frequently than its competitors, and this is definitely an area where Solana will need to regain the crypto community’s trust.
In Solana, updates related to staking happen in “epochs”. In other words—staking, unstaking, and the distribution of staking rewards happens when the current Solana epoch ends and a new epoch starts. One epoch typically lasts between 2-3 days, but the exact length depends on how long the block times are in each epoch. At the time of writing, the Solana blockchain is in its 417th epoch and has a block height of about 163.5 million.
Solana TPS—How many transactions per second can Solana handle?
Per the Solana whitepaper, Solana is theoretically capable of handling up to 710,000 transactions per second. Moving away from theoretical targets, we can point out that Solana’s transactions per second peaked at around 65,000 during testing.
While these figures are interesting, how many transactions per second is Solana actually handling in the real world? In practice, Solana is handling between 5,000 and 10,000 transactions per second, according to data from Solana Compass. The actual figure fluctuates quite a bit on a block-by-block basis depending on demand. If you wish to see the current Solana TPS, you can find the relevant information on most Solana explorers.
Raw Solana TPS data over an 1 hour period. Image source: Solana Compass.
However, there is a caveat to these figures. This is because the raw TPS metric doesn’t just count standard Solana transactions, but also includes vote transactions submitted by validators. Still, Solana is easily among the most performant blockchains on the market today when it comes to the number of transactions it can handle per second.
Solana is expected to scale even further in the future
While we can see that Solana is already able to process a large number of transactions per second, the platform’s scalability is expected to improve even further in future.
One project that could help Solana massively improve its scalability is Firedancer. Firedancer is a Solana validator client being developed by high-frequency trading firm Jump using the C++ programming language. According to Firedancer developers, the client is theoretically capable of processing up to 600,000 transactions per second.
Jump Trading claims that Solana’s throughput is currently not bound by hardware limitations, but software inefficiencies. The company aims to use its experience at the cutting edge of the high-frequency trading industry to create a Solana validator client that operates at the very limits of what the currently available hardware can handle.
Firedancer will also contribute to the effective decentralization of Solana by providing an alternative validator client to the one created by Solana Labs. A greater variety of clients used by validator nodes means that bugs and vulnerabilities in one implementation have less impact on the network as a whole.
If you wish to learn about Firedancer in more detail, check out this video from Jump Trading’s Kevin Bowers speaking at the Breakpoint 2022 conference.
Solana TPS versus other blockchains
As we’ve already mentioned, Solana’s TPS figures are very impressive when compared to other blockchains. Let’s check out exactly how Solana stacks up against other popular layer 1 blockchain platforms in terms of throughput.
Blockchain Transactions per second (TPS) Solana 65,000 TPS* Polygon 7,000 TPS* Avalanche 4,500 TPS* XRP 1,500 TPS Cardano 250 TPS Litecoin 50 TPS Ethereum 30 TPS Bitcoin 7 TPS
*Achieved in testing.
The bottom line—Solana is one of the fastest blockchains available today
Whether you are trading NFTs on Solana or participating on the platform’s decentralized finance apps, you’ll be enjoying low fees and fast transactions. Solana’s transactions per second figure can easily go into the thousands.
To be frank, the maximum number of transactions Solana can process is not really relevant for everyday users, as it can handle the current level of demand without too many issues. However, it’s good to know that Solana will likely be able to tackle the load even if blockchain is adopted by a much greater number of people in the future.
Solana’s scalability is one of the biggest reasons why Solana has a good chance of recovering from the crash it saw in 2022.
