In the past few days, discussions around Solana's 100K TPS have increased, primarily because @cavemanloverboy has indeed achieved over 100,000 TPS on the Solana mainnet. However, most people do not understand the significance behind this data:
1) First of all, this experiment by cavey is essentially a limit test under "ideal conditions." This means that it does not represent the normal performance of the Solana mainnet and differs from laboratory data in a testnet environment, but is not far off.
He 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 other programs. Each transaction is only 200 bytes, far below the normal transaction size of 1KB+.
This means that the 100K TPS test was calculated under non-normal transaction conditions; it tests the extreme throughput of the Solana network layer and consensus layer, rather than the actual processing capability 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 of Firedancer into the existing Solana validator.
In essence, it uses Wall Street's high-frequency trading technology stack to reconstruct Solana's node system, achieving performance improvements through fine memory management, custom thread scheduling, and other low-level optimizations. Just by replacing some components, a performance increase of 3-5 times can be achieved.
3) This test experiment indicates that Solana can achieve TPS of over 100K under ideal conditions. So why is the daily TPS only 3000-4000? In summary, there are roughly three reasons:
Solana's POH consensus mechanism requires Validators to continuously vote to maintain it, and these voting transactions occupy over 70% of the block space, narrowing the performance channel left for normal transactions;
There are often a large number of state competition behaviors in Solana's ecosystem activities. For example, when minting new NFTs or releasing new MEMEs, there may be thousands of transactions competing for write permissions to the same account, leading to a high failure rate of transactions;
Arbitrage bots in the Solana ecosystem may send a large number of invalid transactions to seize MEV benefits, resulting in resource wastage.
4) However, the upcoming comprehensive deployment of Firedancer and the Alpenglow consensus upgrade 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 also reducing confirmation times to 150 milliseconds, making Solana's DEX experience infinitely closer 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 crucially about achieving client diversity, allowing Solana to have multiple clients like Ethereum's Geth and Nethermind, directly improving decentralization and single-point node failure issues.
That's all.
Therefore, those who understand the discussion around Solana's 100K TPS actually see it as confidence in the future upgrades of Solana's clients and consensus protocols. Those who do not understand are trying to give Solana a sense of presence through a TPS arms race (even though TPS competition is already outdated). However, if one understands the significance behind the experiment, there are indeed valuable insights to gain. This is a bit of popular science, shared for everyone.
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