In the VIP club of the most popular blockchains, Solana (SOL) is undoubtedly establishing itself as a leading player. This momentum is supported by its ongoing developments, such as the recent integration of its validation software, Firedancer, which is capable of boosting its performance.
Firedancer: 1 million transactions per second (TPS) on Solana?
While longevity is a guarantee of quality, the promises made by the Firedancer validation software, recently integrated into Solana, could be numerous. Indeed, its development required the commitment of developers from the venture capital firm Jump Crypto over a period of three years before it finally became operational at the end of this year.
In practice, this new tool will initially enable Solana to increase the diversity of its client software, designed to facilitate the connection of validators to its blockchain in order to verify transactions and participate in its consensus, while limiting potential failures that could occur, according to a recent report by Solana R&D company Helius.
Relying entirely on a single client implementation is a significant driver of centralization, as it carries the risk that a critical software bug could cause a liveness failure across the entire network.
Helius
Originally scheduled for the second quarter of last year, this integration of Firedancer comes after a 100-day testing period with a select few validators, with 50,000 blocks in operational production.
Since its inception in 2022, this client software has aimed to enable the Solana blockchain to move closer to its goal of 1 million transactions per second (TPS), notably with the help of its “tile-based modular architecture” capable of executing multiple tasks in parallel.
Solana: the most widely used blockchain in 2025
At the same time, the end-of-year review season is beginning to produce some reports on the blockchain sector. And according to data collected by Jon Ma, co-founder and CEO of the analysis firm Artemis, Solana has emerged as the most popular blockchain over the past year.
Indeed, the Solana blockchain outperforms its competitors in many areas, to the point of establishing itself as number one in terms of:
- Estimated monthly active users (MAU) of 98 million, which is five times more than Base;
- Transactions, with a total of 34 billion, which is 18 times better than the BNB Chain;
- A trading volume of $1.6 trillion, equivalent to 1.7 times that of Ethereum;
- dApp fees representing $5 billion, or twice those of Ethereum;
- Total estimated revenue of $1.5 billion, which is 2.4x that of Tron (TRX).
Ethereum still dominates in terms of total transfer volume (Solana #3), TVL (Solana #2), developer activity (Solana #2), and stablecoin supply (Solana #3). But in terms of pure usage, Solana appears to be the most widely used blockchain in 2025.
Jon Ma
This observation is also confirmed by the CoinGecko platform, which presents the Solana ecosystem as “the most popular for the second consecutive year, capturing 26.79% of global interest in blockchain-specific crypto narratives in 2025.”
