According to U.Today, Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, recently clarified the original vision behind the Solana blockchain. Contrary to the common narrative that focuses on throughput, Yakovenko stated that Solana's primary design was not for maximum throughput. Instead, its main objective is to synchronize state across the globe as quickly as physics allows.
Solana is an integrated, open-source blockchain that aims to synchronize global information at the speed of light. It prioritizes latency and throughput, even at the cost of some verifiability. This is achieved through features such as its unique timestamp mechanism known as proof of history (PoH), the block propagation protocol Turbine, and parallel transaction processing.
Yakovenko's comments followed a recent report by CoinGecko, which identified Solana as the fastest among large blockchains. On April 6 this year, during the meme coin frenzy, Solana's actual daily average transactions per second (TPS) reached a record high of 1,504. This speed makes Solana 46 times faster than Ethereum and over five times faster than Polygon, which has the highest TPS among Ethereum scaling solutions.
However, Yakovenko emphasized that high throughput was not the primary goal. The focus was not merely on creating a 'faster' blockchain, but on building a system capable of achieving global state synchronization with unmatched efficiency. Despite being the fastest blockchain, CoinGecko reported that Solana has only reached 1.6% of its theoretical maximum speed of 65,000 TPS. The increased volume of transactions has led to network congestion, and it remains to be seen how quickly Solana can achieve higher real TPS with its planned improvements.
SOL, the native coin of the Solana blockchain, is currently the fifth largest cryptocurrency, with a market value of $74.74 billion and a trading price of $166.54.