Solana reaches 100K TPS milestone following surge in stress test transactions

Solana Sultput Experiences Brief Surge in Transactions

Developers have reported that Solana Sultput saw a spike, briefly hitting six figures in transactions over the weekend, largely due to advanced program call transactions.

Mert Mumtaz, co-founder of the Solana developer touring company Helius, noted on Sunday that Solana achieved a significant milestone by becoming the “first major blockchain” to process 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) on its mainnet.

He shared details of the Solana block late that day, which revealed 43,016 successful transactions, 50 failed attempts, bringing the total TP to 107,540.

However, it’s worth mentioning that many of these transactions were instructions that didn’t involve trading tokens; they were often “NOOP” program calls, essentially doing nothing significant. These transactions don’t result in meaningful changes or calculations but exist mainly to meet the transaction requirement.

The NOOP program exists to fulfill the need for at least one instruction in transactions that don’t actually require any operations. Though these lightweight programs test the network’s limits, they don’t accurately represent daily payments or the usage of more complex applications.

Mumtaz commented that even if a majority of transactions are program calls, developers estimate that they might achieve around 80-100k TPS for actual operations like transfers, Oracle updates, and so forth.

The Reality of Solana’s Throughput

The actual throughput of Solana is considerably lower than the dramatic spikes caused by these non-functional programs. Currently, according to Solscan, the average total TP stands at around 3,700, though that figure may be misleading as roughly two-thirds of those transactions are just voting transactions.

Solana validators have to submit voting transactions regularly to maintain consensus, with hundreds of these votes inflating the network’s true TPS figures.

Realistically, Solana’s throughput is about 1,050 transactions per second, according to Solscan, while another source pegs it at approximately 1,004 TPS.

Memecoins Lead Solana’s Activity

Most of Solana’s activity comes from memecoins. According to SolScan, the leading platform on the network is the MemeCoin Minting and Trading Platform, Pump.fun, which commands a 62% share of the total locked value.

The overall value of Solana’s decentralized finance applications has seen a surge over the last few months, hitting $10.7 billion recently, compared to a record closure in January.