Base, Solana spar over scaling numbers

Base’s new FlashBlocks feature sparks a debate about scaling metrics

article-image

Artwork by Crystal Le

share


This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.


Solana tends to get touchy about scaling. Since day one, the network’s pitch has been a layer-1 blockchain using novel technology to run faster and cheaper than other layer-1s on offer. 

So it’s no surprise that when Base announced a new feature called FlashBlocks would bring its “effective block times” down to 200 ms — or half the length it takes Solana to create new blocks — Solana followers were quick to point out the somewhat-faulty logic. FlashBlocks are sub-blocks that allow for early confirmation times, but Base’s full block times will still be two seconds. Solana has a feature called shreds which operates similarly to FlashBlocks, but its full block times are 400 ms. 

The whole ordeal is a bit melodramatic, but it highlights something that often doesn’t get across in blockchain scaling conversations, which is that most of this stuff is basically made up anyways.

When Base’s creator Jesse Pollak gets on X to say that Base is about to be “2x faster than” Solana, he reveals nothing about how he’s measuring speed, or why that would matter for Base’s developers and users. Likewise when Firedancer developers say the Solana client can process one million transactions per second in a test environment — it’s a nice sounding number that would almost certainly hit snags in the real world. 

Even if Firedancer could run that fast, it would be of little import: Solana is currently processing roughly 1,000 user TPS. 

On the Lightspeed podcast this week, my co-host Mert Mumtaz got talking with NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin about scaling. Polosukhin and fellow NEAR developer Bowen Wang said the blockchain will soon bring its block times down to 400 ms, and its blockchain shards — part of a scaling technique known as “sharding” — can handle 10,000-20,000 TPS each. 

So if NEAR is so scalable, Mumtaz asked, then why is no one talking about it?

“Everybody now comes out and says they’re scaling, [and] everybody throws a number out from a marketing perspective, [and] as Solana saw, until you actually put real pressure on the system, you don’t actually know how it’s going to behave,” Polosukhin said.

The more important question, in Polosukhin’s view: “What are the use cases that people are actually using blockchain for right now?”

200 ms block times sound nice. One million TPS sounds nice. But if blockchains want to be more than intellectually stimulating engineering problems with no underlying value, then use cases are the much more important conversation to be having.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Unlocked by Template (10).png

Research

Innovations on Aptos’ technical design through Raptr, Shardines, and Zaptos approach near-optimal latency and throughput by unlocking 100% utilization of network resources, with the capacity to settle 260k transactions per second with latencies less than 800ms. The original Move language was revamped with the launch of Move 2, supporting more expressivity in smart contract logic and a scalable ability to interact with high volume datasets. The ecosystem has benefitted from strong asset inflows, now hosting over $1.3B in stablecoins, $450M in bridged BTC, and $530M in RWAs. Activity in the Aptos ecosystem has grown notably over the past year, with monthly application revenue reaching ~$835k and monthly DEX volumes growing to over $5B, both at new all time highs.

article-image

Interchain Labs will focus on sovereign L1s and institutional demand, abandoning plans for smart contracts on the Cosmos Hub

article-image

Also, only three tokens have outperformed bitcoin so far this year: XMR, HYPE and SKY

article-image

The fund group has submitted proposals in recent months for other funds that would hold litecoin, solana, XRP, HBAR, Sui and others

article-image

Momentum’s back — BTC leads, risk assets follow

article-image

Ondo Finance’s acquisition of blockchain development company Strangelove follows its buy of Oasis Pro

article-image

Cryptocurrency and stock traders alike had a lot to unpack Wednesday