rekt: The Illusion of Solana's TPS

Author: rekt

Compiled by: Linqi, Chain Catcher

As the NFT craze has driven ETH gas fees to sky-high levels, users have begun to seek cheaper and faster transaction methods.

With the surge in SOL prices and the promise of cheaper and faster transactions, Solana Wormhole has seen an 82% increase in bridging funds on Ethereum over the past 7 days.

This summer, Solana's performance has been as follows:

Solana's TVL doubled in the first week of September, increasing from $3.53 billion to $7.78 billion. However, this was primarily due to speculation driving up SOL prices, rather than a result of on-chain user activity. Users have been eager to participate in Solana partly because they believe it has improved over Ethereum.

In the white paper by founder Anatoly Yakovenko, he stated that Solana's throughput improvement is achieved by simplifying PoS block confirmations through a historical proof mechanism. Validation is directly interfaced with the Leader, which reduces the confirmation time from validator to validator in traditional PoS.

The network claims to have a potential TPS capacity of 50,000, although the data currently displayed on the Solana Beach dashboard is much lower.

Within an hour, the average block time is 0.56 seconds, with about 2,000 transactions per second. Its current throughput is far higher than Ethereum's 30 TPS.

However, on Solana, most of these transactions come from the validation network itself, as it is designed to require all validation processes to go through the mainnet.

**Solana's Gulf Stream system eliminates the need for a *mempool* by assigning transactions to a future block and forwarding them to validators before the previous block is confirmed.**

No mempool, no front-running.

However, comparisons and competition between Ethereum and Solana are inevitable, as both focus on scaling their TPS in the same challenge.

Solana takes a different approach than Ethereum.

Currently, Ethereum relies on upgrading its code for scaling and seeks workarounds like ETH 2.0 and L2. Meanwhile, Solana places the responsibility of scaling on Solana validators, as they will have to continuously upgrade their validator hardware as they grow.

Moore's Law implies that Solana will actually increase its speed over time.

Despite Solana's innovations in transaction speed and processes, the protocols and projects built on it do not showcase anything new.

Like any new L1, we can see the usual sloppy copies of successful Ethereum projects: "Degenerate Ape Academy," "Solana Monkey Business," "SolPunks."

There's nothing new under the sun…

FTX was not deterred by this lack of creativity and launched a cross-chain NFT marketplace to support NFT trading on Solana. Their motivation for doing so is obvious.

**Solana is the most centralized Layer 1 blockchain. A total of *48%* of the total token supply has been allocated to venture capital firms and insiders.**

When you see how the tokens are promoted, any claims that Solana will become more decentralized over time are irrelevant.

If you want your tokens to grow 'green and organic,' then Solana may not be for you.

Ryan Berckmans tweeted: Vitalik and other senior members of the Ethereum Foundation are almost solely focused on the technical roadmap and development projects, rather than business development with specific partners for selling tokens to the retail market.

Even if you don't care about decentralization, Solana's technical advantages may not be as good as they seem…

As @fpieper wrote in the Lobster Chat Telegram group: Most transactions are voting "transactions" (which is part of Solana's consensus). Essentially, Solana is artificially inflating its numbers.

Here are some data -- based on the latest 3 minutes from solanabeach.io (total 371,974 transactions):

Vote 311,182 => 84%

Serum 37,298

System 18,219

SPL Token 4,106

Memo 773

SPL 309

Swap 63

Stake 24

*Overall, this means that Solana shows *2,000* *TPS in its explorer, but *1,680* TPS is consensus voting, not real transactions.

*Only *300* TPS are real transactions.

*Extrapolating this to the *[theoretical capacity of the network]*, it can be concluded that *65K* would only yield an actual 10K TPS.

*Moreover, if you reach about *50%* of the computational capacity, this would be Solana's actual 5K TPS, and then your network would start to become congested.*

**As the charts show some signs of reversal and the attention of the crowd shifts to **Arbitrum, what will be Solana's next step?

As @Hsaka pointed out: Solana in its current form is as centralized as BSC. The top 12 validators have the cumulative power to shut down the network.

While this makes the majority uneasy, it hasn't stopped BSC's success.

At this point, truly decentralized products are only suitable for the wealthy. These cheaper and faster centralized chains will test Ethereum's "community."

How much do people value decentralization?