In the past few days, discussions around Solana's 100K TPS have increased, as @cavemanloverboy has indeed achieved over 100,000 TPS on the Solana mainnet, but most people have not understood the significance behind this data:
1) First of all, the cavey experiment this time is essentially a limit test under 'ideal conditions'. This means it does not reflect the normal performance of the Solana mainnet and differs from laboratory data in the testnet environment, but it is not far off.
Because it uses a noop (no operation) testing program, which, as the name suggests, only performs the most basic signature verification and directly returns success without executing any calculations, altering any account states, or calling other programs, with each transaction being only 200 bytes, far below the normal transaction size of 1kb+.
This means that the 100K TPS test is calculated under abnormal trading conditions, testing the limit throughput of the Solana network layer and consensus layer, rather than the actual processing capacity of the application layer.
2) Another key to the success of this experiment is the Frankendancer validator client. Simply put, Frankendancer is a 'hybrid test version' of the Firedancer validator being developed by Jump Crypto — integrating the high-performance components already completed in Firedancer into the existing Solana validator.
It is essentially a reconstruction of Solana's node system using Wall Street's high-frequency trading technology stack, achieving performance improvements through fine-grained memory management, custom thread scheduling, and other underlying optimizations. However, merely replacing some components can achieve a performance increase of 3-5 times.
3) This test experiment shows that Solana can achieve TPS of over 100,000 under ideal conditions, so why is the daily TPS only 3000-4000? In summary, there are roughly three reasons:
1. Solana's POH consensus mechanism requires Validators to continuously vote to maintain it, and these voting transactions occupy more than 70% of the block space, narrowing the performance channel left for normal transactions; 2. There often exists a large amount of state competition in Solana's ecosystem activities, for example, when minting new NFTs or releasing new MEMEs, there may be thousands of transactions competing for the same account write permissions, leading to a high failure rate of transactions;
3. The arbitrage bots existing in the Solana ecosystem may send a large number of invalid transactions to seize MEV benefits, leading to resource waste.
4) However, the upcoming full deployment of Firedancer and the Alpenglow consensus upgrade will systematically address these issues.
One key point of the Alpenglow consensus upgrade is that voting transactions have been moved off-chain, which effectively releases 70% of the space for normal transactions, while also reducing the confirmation time to 150 milliseconds, allowing Solana's DEX experience to be infinitely close to CEX. Moreover, enabling the local fee market can also prevent the embarrassing situation of network congestion caused by the Fomo frenzy of a single program.
The benefits of Firedancer, in addition to performance optimization, are crucially related to the realization of client diversity, allowing Solana to have multiple clients like Geth and Nethermind in Ethereum, thereby directly enhancing decentralization and single point node failure aspects.
Above.
Thus, the discussion of Solana's 100K TPS is seen by knowledgeable individuals as confidence in the future upgrades of Solana's clients and consensus protocols, while those less informed attempt to give Solana a sense of presence through a TPS arms race (even though TPS competition has become outdated), but if one understands the significance behind the experiment, there are still substantial insights to gain. Here’s a brief explanation to share with everyone.
