What does it really mean for Solana to achieve 100,000 TPS under ideal conditions?

Recently, Solana achieved 100,000 TPS under ideal conditions. This article will explore the experimental background, the reasons for the differences from daily TPS, and how future upgrades like Firedancer and Alpenglow will systematically enhance network performance and decentralization. This article is based on a piece by On-Chain View, organized, translated, and authored by PANews. (Background: Solana founder Toly: Can Pump.fun upgrade to a 'world-class live streaming platform'? Can the creator capital market take a step further?) (Supplementary Background: The second-generation Solana phone Seeker has started shipping, but an additional fee is required, and the new currency $SKR has yet to arrive.) In the past two days, discussions surrounding Solana's 100,000 TPS have increased because @cavemanloverboy indeed achieved 100,000+ TPS on the Solana mainnet, but most people do not fully understand the significance behind this data: 1) Firstly, this experiment by cavey is essentially a limit test under 'ideal conditions.' This means that this is not the normal performance of the Solana mainnet and differs from lab data in the testnet environment, but is not far off. This is because it used 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, changing any account states, or calling any other programs, with each transaction only 200 bytes, far below the normal transaction size of 1kb+. This means that this test of 100,000 TPS was calculated under abnormal trading conditions; it tested the extreme throughput of the Solana network layer and consensus layer, not the actual processing capacity of the application layer. 2) Another key to this experiment's success is the Frankendancer validator client. Simply put, Frankendancer is a 'mixed test version' of the Firedancer validator that Jump Crypto is developing — integrating the high-performance components of Firedancer that have been completed into the existing Solana validators. Essentially, it reconstructs the Solana node system using the high-frequency trading technology stack from Wall Street, achieving performance improvements through fine memory management and custom thread scheduling optimizations. Just by replacing some components, a performance boost of 3-5 times can be achieved. 3) This test experiment illustrates that under ideal conditions, Solana can achieve TPS of over 100,000. So why does it only have 3,000-4,000 TPS on a daily basis? In summary, there are roughly three reasons: 1. The POH consensus mechanism of Solana requires validators to continuously vote to maintain, and these voting transactions occupy over 70% of the block space, leaving a narrow performance channel for normal transactions; 2. Solana's ecosystem activities often have a large amount of state competition, such as 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. Arbitrage bots in the Solana ecosystem may send a large number of invalid transactions to capture MEV profits, resulting in resource waste. 4) However, the upcoming full deployment of Firedancer and the consensus upgrade of Alpenglow will systematically address these issues. One key point of the Alpenglow consensus upgrade is to move voting transactions off-chain, effectively releasing 70% of the space for normal transactions while reducing confirmation times to 150 milliseconds, allowing Solana's DEX experience to closely resemble that of CEX. Additionally, the activation of a local fee market can avoid the awkward situation of network congestion caused by the explosive popularity of a single program's FOMO. The benefits of Firedancer, apart from performance optimization, are crucially achieving client diversity, allowing Solana to have multiple clients like Geth and Nethermind similar to Ethereum, directly enhancing decentralization and single-point node failure resilience. In summary, the discussion around Solana's 100,000 TPS reflects the confidence in Solana's future upgrades to its clients and consensus protocol for those in the know, while those unfamiliar may attempt to elevate Solana's status through a TPS arms race (even though TPS competition is already outdated). However, understanding the significance behind the experiment is quite rewarding, and I share this information for everyone. Related reports: Is Solana's prosperity merely superficial? Is the rise of contemporary tokens relying solely on behind-the-scenes manipulation? Has the on-chain cycle reached its end? Solana founder criticizes meme coins and NFTs as 'digital garbage,' community at war: but revenue accounts for 62%. What is Trends.fun, recently launched by Solana? Can turning tweets into tokens reignite the SocialFi craze? "What does it really mean for Solana to achieve 100,000 TPS under ideal conditions?" This article was first published in BlockTempo (the most influential blockchain news media).