CoinGecko recently published a report highlighting Solana’s dominance and revealing it as the fastest among major blockchain networks. With an average of 1,504 transactions per second (TPS), Solana surpasses Ethereum by 46 times and is five times faster than the best Ethereum scaling solution, Polygon.
What’s Happening in Blockchain Networks?
On April 6, 2023, during a surge in memecoin activity, Solana reached its peak performance with the highest recorded daily TPS. The CoinGecko team shared the following insights:
“Despite this impressive achievement, it’s important to note that Solana is operating at only 1.6% of its theoretical maximum speed of 65,000 TPS.”
Blockchain networks that do not support the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) generally outperform EVM-compatible networks in terms of speed. Non-EVM blockchain networks are, on average, 3.9 times faster than their EVM counterparts. Another non-EVM blockchain, Sui, recorded the second highest real TPS at 854, driven by the popularity of the ecosystem game Sui 8192. Other fast non-EVM blockchains include TON with 175 TPS and Near Protocol with 118 TPS.
In contrast, EVM compatible blockchain networks average only 74 TPS. BNB Smart Chain (BSC) leads the EVM category with 378 TPS during a spike in on-chain activity on December 7, 2023. Polygon follows, recording 190 TPS on November 16, 2023, making it the fastest among Ethereum scaling solutions. Polygon is 8.4 times faster than the Ethereum mainnet.
Notable Details
Ethereum and its most comprehensive scaling solutions lag behind Solana and Sui, reaching a total of 500 TPS. Other notable Ethereum scaling solutions include Arbitrum with 59 TPS, Linea with 56 TPS, Base with 37 TPS, and Mantle with 25 TPS.
The study emphasizes that nearly all major blockchains recorded their highest real TPS within the past year. The only exception was Thorchain, which peaked in May 2022. Despite its impressive speed, Solana faced network reliability issues. In February 2024, Solana experienced a significant outage due to performance degradation. Validators reported a temporary halt in transactions, prompting an examination of the network’s efficiency.
