According to data from DefiLlama as of October 30, the Solana network (SOL) processes about 70 million transactions per day, with the trading volume on DEX exchanges exceeding 143 billion USD each month.
The Network Health report for June 2025 from the Solana Foundation states that the network currently has 1,295 consensus validators in 40 countries, with a Nakamoto coefficient of 20 – an indicator reflecting the level of decentralization. The average processing speed of the network reaches approximately 1,100 transactions per second.
These performance improvements were implemented after a 5-hour downtime incident in February 2024. Following the incident, the Solana ecosystem adopted several measures such as Stake-weighted Quality of Service (QoS), customer testing of Firedancer in hybrid form, and adjustments to the validator's economic mechanism through priority fee routing.
Transaction Processing Model and Market Operations
Data from DefiLlama shows that the monthly DEX trading volume of Solana reached around 143 billion USD, while Ethereum reached nearly 138 billion USD during the same period. However, Ethereum only processes less than 1.2 million transactions per day, which is much lower than Solana.
While Ethereum moves most DeFi activity to layer-2 rollups to aggregate and send data to the base layer, Solana handles all transactions directly on a single layer.
Nansen's senior analyst, Jake Kennis, stated that the vibrant activity of Solana comes from a combination of efficient infrastructure and market stimulus factors:
“Solana has done the hard part first: Sealevel supports parallel execution, blocks are created in less than a second, and weighted stake QoS on QUIC helps with low latency and stable fees even under high load. This design helps avoid fragmentation like rollups and creates a trading environment of 'one platform, one wallet, one mempool.'”
Market supporting factors include the 2023 Jito airdrop, the 2024 Jupiter airdrop, memecoin activity on Pump.fun, along with wallet and protocol integration from Phantom, Jupiter, and Uniswap.
Fee Structure and Response to Network Congestion
Solana applies a fixed base fee of 0.000005 SOL per signature, along with an optional priority fee. During the memecoin boom in early 2024, many transactions failed even though users had paid the priority fee.
Version 1.18 later introduced Stake-weighted QoS, allocating block space according to the stake ratio of validators. Messari's report noted a significant decrease in congestion after this feature was implemented.
The fee mechanism of Solana remains localized, with no uniform pricing among validators. According to documentation from Helius and Eclipse Labs, users may pay too high or too low compared to the actual load of the network.
The SIMD-96 proposal adjusts the transfer of all priority fees to validators, changing the revenue distribution without affecting the local pricing mechanism. The July 2025 update of Jito’s TipRouter also allows validators to share priority fees with stakers, adding to traditional staking rewards.
The June 2025 report from the Foundation indicates that the revenue of validators is increasing, while the breakeven stake requirement is decreasing. The implementation of SIMD-96 and the diversification of clients help to redistribute profits within the network.
Kennis comment:
“Reducing reliance on a single client helps the network operate more fairly. This diversity redistributes profits: users benefit from tighter spreads, LPs have quicker arbitrage opportunities, and the profit margins of validators decrease as tip fees become more competitive.”
Aggregator such as Jupiter Ultra V3 continues to optimize the market by reducing harmful MEV while still maintaining arbitrage opportunities.
Client System and Downtime History
The incident on February 6, 2024, lasted for 5 hours, originating from a bug in the Just-in-Time compiler of the Agave client, causing all validators ( running Agave or Jito fork) to restart the network simultaneously.
Then, Jump Crypto developed the Firedancer client using C++, which is currently being tested in a hybrid mode “Frankendancer” – Firedancer handles the consensus and networking parts, while Agave manages the execution part.
The June 2025 report records dozens of validators running Frankendancer, with testing results achieving 1 million TPS. Two other clients, Mithril (Go) and Sig (Zig), are under development.
Kennis said:
“Diverse clients help make the network more robust and expand performance potential. Firedancer and Frankendancer have achieved around 1 million TPS in testing; actual results depend on deployment speed. With wide geographic distribution, QUIC and SW-QoS help maintain stable performance.”
According to Electric Capital's 2024 Developer Report, Solana leads in the number of new developers, with around 7,625 people in the year, although Ethereum still leads in the total number of developers. Additionally, Helium has migrated its entire decentralized wireless network to Solana to handle on-chain transactions.
Comparison with Ethereum
While Solana processes tens of millions of transactions each day, Ethereum maintains under 1.2 million transactions, despite equivalent DEX volume.
The difference lies in the transaction compression mechanism of rollups like Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism, which bundle hundreds of transactions before sending them to the base layer.
Data from Token Terminal shows that the base fee of EIP-1559 for Ethereum will decrease in 2025 due to Layer 2 activity offloading the main network.
Solana, with a fixed fee model and optional priority fees, has a lower average revenue per transaction but a higher number of transactions. Total fee revenue depends on maintaining high trading volume.
The monolithic model ( of Solana helps avoid liquidity fragmentation and eliminates the need for cross-rollup bridges, but requires stronger validator hardware and tighter coordination.
On the contrary, Ethereum's rollup model distributes the operational burden to Layer 2 operators, but also causes liquidity fragmentation and introduces trust risks with the sequencer.
Monitoring Prospects
- The deployment speed of Firedancer will determine the client diversity capability before the next network stress event.
- Improving the fee market through SIMD will clarify the relationship between priority fees and transaction processing speed.
- The combination of SIMD-96 and diverse clients will verify whether the validator's profit margin decreases as predicted.
- The impact of MEV after client diversification will show whether aggregators can reduce adverse extraction while still maintaining arbitrage efficiency.
If tip revenue among clients becomes more competitive, the staking yield )APR( may stabilize at a lower level.
Data in the coming time will determine whether the parallel processing model, completed in an instant, and the unified liquidity of Solana can sustainably scale without the need for layering like Ethereum – or will ultimately still have to adapt to similar architectural changes.
Thạch Sanh
