Debates flare up over blockchain TPS in testing environments

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Crypto’s chattering class has been beefing over transactions per second (TPS) lately, a metric that’s often used in the abstract to demonstrate a blockchain’s throughput. Solana boasts a higher TPS than its main rival, Ethereum.

The most recent social media go-round was ignited by the news that Firedancer, a high-performance client being developed by Jump Crypto and meant to push Solana’s TPS lead even further, had entered its testnet phase. Jump chief scientist Kevin Bowers said in a Solana Breakpoint talk that Firedancer had hit 1 million TPS in synthetic testing. 

A crypto VC then posted about Solana shipping a “1m tps client” while the Ethereum world was consumed in archaic debates about “whether eth is money,” and the engagement bait went down hook, line, and sinker.

Namik Muduroglu, part of the founding team for the yet-unreleased layer-2 MegaETH, posted a GitHub screenshot noting that the Solana protocol is currently limited to around 81,000 TPS at a maximum and that MegaETH’s block times would be shorter than Solana’s, meaning transactions could be processed some milliseconds faster. 

Solana folks shot back, arguing that the 81,000 TPS parameter can be changed and pointing out that MegaETH is, to paraphrase Chris Brown, hating from outside the [existent blockchain] club.

As an idea, TPS is pretty easy to grok — how many transactions can a blockchain process every second? One million is a nice, large, round number, but things get more complicated in practice.

For one, TPS is often cited aspirationally. Firedancer’s 1 million TPS came in a testing environment, without actual user transactions. Unreleased blockchains Monad and Layer N also drew media coverage for TPS numbers that came in testing. 

Solana’s own TPS is heavily affected by whether or not one includes “vote” transactions which come from validators processing blocks. To this point, developer João Mendonça pointed out to me that TPS can measure a blockchain’s demand and capacity. Vote transactions don’t demonstrate demand, but they do show capacity, Mendonça argued. 

This is all separate from block times, which measure how quickly new blocks are created. Solana’s block time is 400 ms, which is a figure that can get faster with better hardware, the Solana Foundation says. Muduroglo implied that MegaETH wants to push block times closer to 10 ms.

But TPS also assumes demand for transactions in the first place. Solana Foundation institutional head Nick Ducoff told me on X that higher TPS is meaningful for use-cases like high frequency trading, an algorithm-driven style of trading can involve making tons of transactions very quickly. 

This comports with Solana’s vision for a decentralized Nasdaq — but that would require many more firms deciding they want to do such business onchain.

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