Written by: Haotian
Recently, discussions around Solana's 100,000 TPS have increased, as @cavemanloverboy has indeed achieved over 100,000 TPS on the Solana mainnet. However, most people have not understood the significance behind this data:
1) First of all, this experiment by cavey 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 under testnet conditions, but is still quite similar.
This is because it adopted a noop (no operation) testing program, which, as the name implies, only performs the most basic signature verification and directly returns success without executing any computation, changing any account state, or calling any other programs, with each transaction being only 200 bytes, far below the normal transaction size of 1kb+.
This means that this 100,000 TPS test was calculated under abnormal transaction conditions; it tests the extreme throughput of the Solana network layer and consensus layer, rather than the actual processing capacity at the application layer.
2) Another key to the success of this experiment is the Frankendancer validator client. In simple terms, Frankendancer is a 'hybrid test version' of the Firedancer validator being developed by Jump Crypto - it grafts the high-performance components of Firedancer onto the existing Solana validators.
In fact, it has reconstructed Solana's node system using the high-frequency trading technology stack from Wall Street, achieving performance improvements through fine memory management, custom thread scheduling, and other underlying optimizations. Just replacing some components can achieve a performance increase of 3-5 times.
3) This test experiment shows that Solana can achieve a TPS of over 100,000 under ideal conditions. So why is the daily TPS only 3,000-4,000?
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 are often a large number of state competition behaviors in Solana's ecological activities, such as when minting new NFTs or launching new MEMEs, where thousands of transactions may compete for write permissions on the same account, resulting in a high ratio of failed transactions.
3. Arbitrage bots in the Solana ecosystem may send a large number of invalid transactions to seize MEV benefits, resulting in 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 it moves voting transactions off-chain, which effectively frees up 70% of the space for normal transactions, while also reducing confirmation times to 150 milliseconds, bringing the DEX experience on Solana very close to that of CEX. Additionally, the activation of a local fee market can prevent the embarrassing situation of network congestion caused by the Fomo frenzy of a single program.
The benefits of Firedancer, aside from performance optimization, are primarily in achieving client diversity, allowing Solana to have multiple clients like Geth and Nethermind in Ethereum's sense, directly enhancing decentralization and reducing single point node failures.
That's all.
Therefore, the discussion about 100,000 TPS on Solana is actually a sign of confidence in the future upgrades of Solana's clients and consensus protocols for those who understand the field, while those who do not try to leverage TPS arms races to give Solana presence (even though TPS comparison is already outdated). However, if one understands the significance of the experiment behind it, there's quite a bit of insight to gain, so here’s a little popular science to share with everyone.
