Debates flare up over blockchain TPS in testing environments

The most recent social media go-round was ignited by news from Firedancer

article-image

CryptoFX/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks

share


Today, enjoy the Lightspeed newsletter on Blockworks.co. Tomorrow, get the news delivered directly to your inbox. Subscribe to the Lightspeed newsletter


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.


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