On Sunday, the Solana (SOL) blockchain managed to exceed 100,000 transactions per second. However, there is a caveat to consider. What is it?
Solana surpasses 100,000 transactions per second
On Sunday, the Solana (SOL) blockchain surpassed a particularly symbolic milestone, with a total of 107,540 transactions per second. At least, that’s what Mert Mumtaz, developer and CEO of Helius, an infrastructure provider on Solana, claims. On X, he shared a block in which we can see no fewer than 43,006 transactions:
While the next block has fewer than 2,600 transactions, the previous four blocks have 39,821, 40,727, and 29,081 transactions, respectively, all within a three-second interval.
Despite this impressive performance on a mainnet, these figures should be taken with a grain of salt. This is because the blocks in question contain very few transactions in the usual sense. For example, the block shared by Mert Mumtaz only lists 42 swaps. In reality, the majority of transactions are so-called “noop” transactions, meaning “no operation.” This means that they do not change the state of the blockchain, do not call any smart contracts, and do not perform any calculations on the network. However, the developer anticipated this criticism, explaining that this type of transaction still required other types of loads to be taken into account, beyond “computing units” (CUs), which would not detract from the relevance of the test: ,” which would not detract from the relevance of the test:
The way Solana works is that there are execution CUs, but there are also other costs that are taken into account in the cost_model calculation. This includes things downstream of VM [virtual machine] instantiation, such as data loading or signature verification. So, if you take all that into account, you can infer that it is also theoretically possible to achieve around 80 to 100k TPS for transfers, oracle updates, and similar operations.
Of course, Solana’s true ability to reach 100,000 transactions per second with operations such as transfers between addresses remains to be proven. In addition to theoretical capacity, there would also need to be real demand on the network, which is not currently the case.
To date, Solana averages around 1,000 transactions per second each day.
For its part, SOL is trading at $178.74 at the time of writing, down 2.2% over the last 24 hours.
