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Solana recorded 107,540 transactions per second on mainnet over the weekend, marking what developers claim as the first time a major blockchain has achieved 100,000 TPS.
Helius co-founder Mert Mumtaz announced the milestone on social media, crediting developer “dr cavey phd” for executing the stress test that pushed Solana’s throughput to six figures.
Stress Test Reveals Theoretical Network Capacity Limits
The achievement occurred during a high-load test involving predominantly “noop” program calls.
These lightweight operations satisfy Solana’s requirement for transactions to include at least one instruction without performing meaningful computation or state changes.
Block 360650523 contained 43,016 successful transactions and 50 failed ones during the record-breaking session.
Mumtaz argued that despite the test nature of these transactions, the achievement validates Solana’s theoretical capacity for handling 80,000-100,000 TPS in real-world operations, including transfers and oracle updates.
The developer emphasized that Solana’s cost model calculation includes factors beyond execution compute units, such as signature verification and data loading overhead.
Solana’s actual daily throughput remains significantly lower than the stress test figures.
Current TPS sits around 3,600 according to Solscan, though approximately two-thirds of these transactions are validator voting messages required for consensus participation rather than user-initiated activities.
Real user transaction throughput on Solana averages 900 to 1,050 TPS.
The network continues deriving most activity from memecoin trading, especially from existing launchpads like Pump.fun and new ones like Let’sBonk.
Technical Reality Behind the Numbers Game
The 100K TPS milestone primarily consisted of no-operation program calls designed for stress testing rather than meaningful blockchain operations.
These transactions do not transfer tokens, alter state, or execute complex smart contract functions that define typical blockchain usage.
Solana validators must regularly submit vote transactions to participate in network consensus, with hundreds of validators voting multiple times per slot.
These consensus messages inflate reported TPS figures but do not represent user-facing financial activity or decentralized application interactions.
Analysis indicates Solana’s realistic maximum for meaningful work reaches approximately 10,000 TPS, though regular usage typically operates well below this threshold.
The blockchain’s architecture requires all transactions to include at least one instruction, making noop calls necessary for operations that otherwise would not need computational work.
Payment networks like Visa process 24,000 TPS, and Mastercard handles 5,000 TPS under real-world conditions, both exceeding any public blockchain’s sustained performance for actual financial transactions.
Layer 2 solutions on Ethereum can spike to tens of thousands of TPS but require off-chain aggregation rather than single-chain throughput.
Comparative analysis places Solana ahead of other major blockchains for real user transactions, with Sui achieving approximately 854 TPS, Binance Smart Chain reaching 378 TPS, and Polygon managing 190 TPS.
Ethereum mainnet processes only 22 TPS, though Layer 2 solutions significantly improve performance.
Market Context Amid Protocol Upgrade Discussions
The TPS milestone occurred as Solana validators prepare to vote on SIMD-0326, the Alpenglow protocol upgrade that would replace the current TowerBFT consensus mechanisms with a system targeting 100-150 millisecond block finality.
The upgrade introduces direct voting and signature aggregation to reduce bandwidth overhead from current gossip traffic.
Alpenglow’s Votor protocol would eliminate on-chain vote transactions that currently inflate TPS figures, implementing off-chain voting with a 1.6 SOL per epoch Validator Admission Ticket fee.
The upgrade addresses performance limitations that impose 12.8-second finality delays without formal safety guarantees.
Notably, SOL token is trading around $180 at the time of writing, though it remains down 38% from January’s $293 all-time high.
The SEC has also recently extended review periods for Bitwise and 21Shares Solana ETF proposals to October 16, with Bloomberg analysts expecting approval by mid-October.
However, despite these, open interest in SOL derivatives increased near record $12 billion levels, indicating long-term positioning for continued uptrend momentum.
The network’s memecoin-focused activity continues driving transaction volume, with decentralized finance applications approaching previous value highs despite broader market corrections.
For the new proposal, validators face mixed sentiment about Alpenglow implementation costs and technical risks during the current bull market cycle.
