70M daily transactions, $143B volume: How Solana won DeFi’s throughput race

Solana (SOL) processes roughly 70 million transactions per day and recorded over $143 billion in month-to-month DEX quantity as of Oct. 30, in accordance with DefiLlama.

The community operates with 1,295 consensus validators throughout 40 international locations, and a Nakamoto Coefficient of 20, in accordance with the Foundation’s June 2025 Network Health Report. Production throughput runs at roughly 1,100 transactions per second.

The throughput enhancements adopted a five-hour outage in February 2024. The occasion prompted the Solana ecosystem to introduce measures resembling stake-weighted Quality of Service (QoS), exams with the Firedancer shopper in hybrid type, and adjusted validator economics by means of precedence price routing.

Transaction quantity and execution mannequin

DeFiLlama information reveals Solana’s spot month-to-month DEX quantity at roughly $143 billion as of Oct. 30. Ethereum’s quantity in the identical interval reached almost $138 billion.

However, Ethereum’s base layer processes fewer than 1.2 million transactions per day, whereas Solana processes over 70 million.

Ethereum routes most DeFi exercise to layer-2 rollups that batch transactions earlier than selecting the bottom layer. Solana executes all transactions on a single layer.

Jake Kennis, senior analysis analyst at Nansen, attributes Solana’s exercise to infrastructure and market catalysts.

In a observe, he said:

“Solana’s runtime did the exhausting work first: Sealevel’s parallel execution, sub-second blocks, stake-weighted QoS over QUIC stored latency low and costs steady beneath load. That design prevented rollup-style fragmentation and delivered ‘one venue, one pockets, one mempool’ buying and selling.”

Market catalysts included Jito airdrops in 2023, Jupiter airdrops in 2024, memecoin exercise by way of Pump.enjoyable, and pockets integrations from Phantom, Jupiter, and Uniswap.

Fee construction and congestion response

Solana fees a hard and fast base price of 0.000005 SOL per signature plus optionally available precedence charges. During the early 2024 memecoin surge, transactions failed regardless of customers paying precedence charges.

Version 1.18 carried out stake-weighted Quality of Service, allocating block house proportional to validator stake. Messari’s report for the second quarter of final yr documented congestion discount following SQoS deployment.

The price mechanism stays native slightly than international. Helius and Eclipse Labs documentation clarify that Solana’s parallel transaction scheduler doesn’t uniformly value inclusion throughout all validators primarily based on precedence charges paid.

Users can overpay or underpay relative to the precise community load. SIMD-96 routes all precedence charges to validators, altering income distribution however not the native pricing construction.

Additionally, Jito’s July 2025 TipRouter improve permits validators to distribute precedence charges to stakers alongside protocol-defined staking rewards.

The Foundation’s June 2025 report signifies that validator whole income (REV) is rising, whereas breakeven stake necessities are declining. Most stake beforehand ran on Jito’s MEV-auction infrastructure, concentrating on extraction.

SIMD-96 and shopper variety are redistributing this surplus. Kennis famous:

“Fewer single-stack dependencies imply fairer execution. Diversification might redistribute surplus: customers acquire by way of tighter spreads, LPs see quicker arbitrage, and validator margins compress as tip income competes down.”

Jupiter Ultra V3 and related aggregators cut back dangerous MEV whereas preserving arbitrage alternatives.

Client implementation and outage historical past

The Feb. 6, 2024, outage lasted 5 hours and originated from a bug within the Just-in-Time compiler utilized by the Agave shopper.

All validators ran both Agave or Jito’s fork, requiring a coordinated community restart. The Foundation’s autopsy documented the failure.

Firedancer, developed by Jump Crypto in C++, entered testing in hybrid “Frankendancer” mode, the place Firedancer handles consensus and networking whereas Agave manages execution.

The Foundation’s June 2025 report notes dozens of validators operating Frankendancer. Lab exams demonstrated 1 million TPS.

Two further purchasers are beneath improvement, Mithril in Go and Sig in Zig.

Kennis defined:

“Client variety hardens the community and opens efficiency headroom. Firedancer and Frankendancer have proven ~1M TPS in exams; real-world good points depend upon rollout. Even with broader validator geography, QUIC and SW-QoS maintain constant throughput.”

Electric Capital’s 2024 Developer Report ranked Solana first when it comes to new developer additions, with roughly 7,625 new builders that yr.

Ethereum retains essentially the most intensive absolute developer base. Solana Mobile Stack integrates pockets, safety, and browser performance into Android {hardware}. Helium migrated its decentralized wi-fi community to Solana for on-chain settlement.

Ethereum comparability

Ethereum’s base layer processed fewer than 1.2 million transactions per day in latest intervals whereas attaining comparable DEX quantity to Solana.

The distinction is transaction compression by means of rollups. Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism batch a whole lot of transactions right into a single base-layer submission.

Token Terminal information reveals that Ethereum’s EIP-1559 base price declined in 2025 as Layer 2 exercise lowered demand on the bottom layer.

Solana’s fastened base price, mixed with precedence charges, generates decrease per-transaction income however greater transaction counts. Total price income relies on sustained transaction quantity.

Solana’s monolithic mannequin avoids cross-rollup bridging and maintains unified liquidity. The trade-off is greater validator {hardware} necessities and tighter coordination wants.

Ethereum’s rollup mannequin distributes operational complexity to Layer 2 operators, but it surely fragments liquidity and introduces belief assumptions associated to sequencers.

Monitoring factors

Firedancer adoption fee will decide whether or not Solana achieves shopper variety earlier than the subsequent community stress occasion. Full Firedancer deployment may allow greater throughput if validators migrate from Agave.

Fee-market enhancements by means of SIMDs ought to tighten the correlation between precedence charges paid and the velocity of transaction inclusion.

SIMD-96’s price routing to validators mixed with shopper variety will check whether or not validator margins compress as Kennis predicts, or whether or not throughput good points offset margin strain.

MEV economics post-diversification will present whether or not aggregators efficiently cut back dangerous extraction whereas sustaining arbitrage effectivity.

If validator tip income turns into extra aggressive throughout a number of shopper implementations, staker APRs might stabilize at decrease ranges.

The information will present whether or not Solana’s parallel execution, sub-second finality, and unified liquidity mannequin can scale with out the multi-layer fragmentation Ethereum adopted, or whether or not base-layer coordination constraints finally power related architectural modifications.

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