In response to DefiLlama, Solana (SOL) processes roughly 70 million transactions per day and recorded greater than $143 billion in month-to-month DEX buying and selling quantity as of October 30.
In response to the inspiration’s June 2025 community well being report, the community operates with 1,295 consensus verifiers in 40 international locations and a Nakamoto coefficient of 20. Manufacturing throughput runs at roughly 1,100 transactions per second.
The throughput enhancement adopted a five-hour outage in February 2024. This occasion prompted the Solana ecosystem to introduce measures similar to stake-focused high quality of service (QoS), testing with a hybrid type of Firedancer shopper, and adjusted validator economics with precedence price routing.
Buying and selling quantity and execution mannequin
As of October 30, Solana’s spot month-to-month DEX buying and selling quantity was roughly $143 billion, in accordance with DeFiLlama knowledge. Throughout the identical interval, Ethereum’s buying and selling quantity reached roughly $138 billion.
Nonetheless, Ethereum’s base layer processes lower than 1.2 million transactions per day, whereas Solana processes over 70 million transactions.
Ethereum routes most DeFi exercise to a layer 2 rollup, which batches transactions earlier than resolving them on the base layer. Solana executes all transactions in a single layer.
Jake Kenneth, senior analysis analyst at Nansen, attributes Solana’s exercise to infrastructure and market catalysts.
In his notes, he mentioned:
“Solana’s runtime did the heavy lifting initially. Sealevel’s parallel execution, sub-second blocks, and stake-weighted QoS on QUIC saved latency low and costs secure beneath load. Its design averted rollup-style fragmentation and enabled “one venue, one pockets, one pool” transactions. ”
Market drivers embrace Jito airdrop in 2023, Jupiter airdrop in 2024, memecoin exercise by way of Pump.enjoyable, pockets integrations from Phantom, Jupiter, and Uniswap, and extra.
Price construction and dealing with of congestion
Solana prices a hard and fast base price of 0.000005 SOL per signature plus an elective precedence price. In the course of the memecoin rally in early 2024, transactions failed although customers paid precedence charges.
In model 1.18, we carried out a stake-weighted high quality of service by allocating block house proportional to a validator’s stake. Messari’s report for the second quarter of final yr documented the discount in congestion after implementing SQoS.
The pricing mechanism stays native moderately than international. Helius and Eclipse Labs documentation explains that Solana’s parallel transaction scheduler doesn’t uniformly value inclusions throughout all validators primarily based on the precedence price paid.
Customers can overpay or underpay in comparison with the precise community load. SIMD-96 routes all precedence charges to validators and modifications income distribution, however doesn’t change the native pricing construction.
Moreover, Jito’s July 2025 TipRouter improve will permit validators to distribute precedence charges to stakers together with protocol-defined staking rewards.
The Basis’s June 2025 report reveals that validator gross income (REV) is rising whereas break-even staking necessities are reducing. Beforehand, most shares operated on Jito’s MEV public sale infrastructure and targeted on extraction.
SIMD-96 and shopper variety are redistributing this surplus. Kenneth identified:
“Much less single-stack dependencies imply execution is fairer. Diversification can redistribute surplus. Customers can revenue by means of tighter spreads, LPs expertise quicker arbitrage, and validators’ margins are compressed as tip revenue declines.”
Jupiter Extremely V3 and comparable aggregators cut back dangerous MEV whereas preserving arbitrage alternatives.
Shopper implementation and outage historical past
The February 6, 2024 outage lasted 5 hours and was attributable to a bug within the just-in-time compiler utilized by the Agave shopper.
All validators ran a fork of Agave or Jito, which required them to regulate and restart their networks. Basis autopsy investigation recorded failure.
Developed in C++ by Bounce Crypto, Firedancer went into testing in a hybrid “Frankendancer” mode. On this mode, Firedancer handles consensus and networking, and Agave manages execution.
The Basis’s June 2025 report lists dozens of validators operating Frankedancer. Lab assessments have demonstrated 1 million TPS.
Two extra shoppers are in improvement: Mithril in Go and Sig in Zig.
Information defined:
“Shopper variety strengthens the community and creates efficiency headroom. Firedancer and Frankendancer have proven as much as 1 million TPS in testing, however precise advantages will depend upon rollout. QUIC and SW-QoS preserve constant throughput even when validators have broad geographic protection.”
Electrical Capital’s 2024 Developer Report ranked Solana No. 1 for brand spanking new developer additions, with roughly 7,625 new builders that yr.
Ethereum holds absolutely the widest developer base. Solana Cellular Stack integrates pockets, safety, and browser performance into Android {hardware}. Helium migrates its decentralized wi-fi community to Solana for on-chain funds.
Ethereum comparability
Latest Ethereum baselayers processed lower than 1.2 million transactions per day whereas reaching comparable DEX volumes to Solana.
The distinction is transaction compression by means of rollups. Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism mix a whole lot of transactions right into a single base layer submission.
In response to Token Terminal knowledge, Ethereum’s EIP-1559 base price decreased in 2025 as layer 2 exercise lowered base layer demand.
The mix of Solana’s fastened base price and precedence price ends in decrease income per transaction, however a better variety of transactions. Complete price revenue depends upon sustained buying and selling quantity.
Solana’s monolithic mannequin avoids cross-rollup bridging and maintains uniform liquidity. The tradeoff is increased {hardware} necessities for validators and tighter coordination.
Ethereum’s rollup mannequin distributes operational complexity to layer 2 operators, but it surely fragments liquidity and introduces belief assumptions associated to sequencers.
monitoring level
Firedancer’s adoption fee determines whether or not Solana can obtain shopper variety earlier than the subsequent community stress occasion. In case your validators are migrating from Agave, totally deploying Firedancer could enhance throughput.
SIMD’s enhancements to the price market ought to strengthen the correlation between most well-liked charges paid and commerce uptake velocity.
We are going to check whether or not SIMD-96’s price routing to validators, mixed with shopper variety, compresses validator margins as Kenneth predicts, or whether or not elevated throughput offsets margin pressures.
Publish-diversification MEV economics reveals whether or not aggregators can efficiently cut back dangerous extraction whereas sustaining arbitrage effectivity.
If validator chip revenues turn into extra aggressive amongst a number of shopper implementations, staker APRs could stabilize at a decrease degree.
This knowledge will point out whether or not Solana’s parallel execution, sub-second finality, and unified liquidity mannequin can scale with out the multi-layer fragmentation that Ethereum employs, or whether or not base layer coordination constraints will in the end drive comparable architectural modifications.
