Speed
Solana is designed for high throughput. On average it is 400 TPS and can reach more than 2000 TPS. Based on the entire TPS (including voting transactions performed by validators to reach consensus), the average performance of Solana is ~4000 TPS. Solana's theoretical upper limit is 710,000 TPS on a standard gigabit network and 28.4 million TPS on a 40-gigabit network. For comparison, the average speed of the Ethereum network, including all its sidechains, over the past month was ~42 TPS.
Unlike blockchains, which process one transaction at a time, Sealevel (Solana smart contract execution environment), designed for parallel processing of transactions.
Solana's Proof of History (PoH) technology also helps increase the speed of Solana. PoH is a time-stamping function for transactions that allows nodes to agree on the order of events. This speeds up transaction confirmation times without compromising security or scalability.
Confirmation time in blocks and seconds/minutes
Solana strives for a target transaction confirmation time of 400 milliseconds. In practice, it can fluctuate between 500-600 milliseconds depending on network load, but it is still faster than other blockchains. For example, in a deep dive into Solana, Visa analyzed blockchain confirmation times in blocks and seconds/minutes using data provided by Circle. Visa noted that it takes an average of ~0.4 seconds and 1 block to confirm USDC on Solana.
Fees
Gas in Solana is often less than $0.001. < /p> 
< i>The difference between Solana and Ethereum in the cost and distribution of gas
A distinctive feature of Solana is the predictability of gas. Solana keeps gas low by isolating congestion based on areas of high demand, rather than by using a blanket gas rate like Ethereum.
State compression
State compression in Solana is a way to save space in blocks. To save space, Solana does not use conventional data compression, but instead turns big data into a cryptographic hash. This hash is stored in blocks using a Merkle tree structure. This structure allows data to be quickly updated and verified.
This method is much more cost-effective and has resulted in the creation of a large number of compressed NFTs. According to Messari< !--/noindex-->, in the third quarter of 2023, almost 45 million compressed NFTs were created on Solana.
Decentralization
Solana is one one of the world's largest Proof of Stake (PoS) networks by number of nodes. It is considered one of the most distributed networks, and its level of decentralization is assessed using the Nakamoto coefficient - an indicator that measures the minimum number of entities required to compromise the network. By status< !--/noindex--> as of March 2023, according to the Solana Foundation, the Nakamoto coefficient in Solana is 31.
The network has ~2000 nodes, located in more than 40 countries around the world. At the time of writing this article, according to Solana Beach, there are 1965 validator nodes on the network, ensuring the security of the network.
The diversity of validators leads to greater network stability, since an error or vulnerability in one place cannot paralyze the entire network. Solana has focused its efforts on creating additional clients (applications) for validators:
- Jito Labs - released the second validator client on the mainnet in August 2022. This is a fork of Solana Labs, which is maintained and deployed by Jito.
- Firedancer is an independent validator client developed in C++ by Jump Crypto. This client is capable of processing up to 1.2 million raw transactions per second and 600,000 after deduplication testing.
- Sig is an intelligently optimized Solana validator client written in Zig. Still in development.
- TinyDancer - develops the first Light Client for Solana. Their goal is not to create blocks and participate in consensus. TinyDancer aims to make it easier for users to check the state of the blockchain without having to run a full node themselves.
Regarding criticism of centralization
Solana has faced criticism regarding its level of decentralization, earning nicknames such as “SQLana.” This criticism often focuses on Solana's architecture and governance rather than the level of decentralization of the network. For example, Solana's close relationship with FTX was highlighted as a point of centralization. However, this remark misses the fact that FTX has also invested in other blockchain projects, indicating a broader commitment to the blockchain ecosystem.
Solana has also come under fire for past network failures, raising questions about its sustainability. In response, Solana has implemented a number of updates to strengthen its network. For example, after implementing QUIC, Solana had no outages related to spam or DDoS attacks, and the network had 100% uptime for the last 8 months.
Concerns have also been raised about the network's high hardware requirements for validators, which could lead to its centralization around a small number of well-funded organizations. To address this issue, the 1.16 update to the Solana Labs validator client significantly reduced random access memory (RAM) requirements, making the validator more accessible to participants. Previously, Solana relied on validator RAM for account indexing, but account indexing has now been reconfigured to default to validator disk.
Yanshu from Luganodes reported that since the release of update 1.16, their validator is successfully running with about 39 GB of memory, which is down from 120 GB in previous versions.
Solana continues to work to strengthen the decentralization and resilience of its network while correcting these issues.
Energy efficiency
Energy consumed in joules (logarithmic scale)
The prevailing criticism of blockchain technology is high power consumption. The competitive nature of Proof of Work (PoW) blockchains has given rise to large-scale BTC mining farms, which has had a negative impact on the environment. One BTC transaction, for example, consumes an average of 5 billion joules. Ethereum has taken these environmental concerns into account and has moved from a PoW to a PoS system. This transition resulted in a 99.84% reduction in Ethereum network energy consumption. But even after this transition, the average energy consumption of a single Ethereum transaction is about 144,000 joules.
Solana has an average power consumption per transaction in Solana of 658 joules. The average power consumption per non-voting transaction in Solana (i.e., user transactions) is 7568 joules. Thus, the energy consumption of a single Solana transaction is comparable to several Google queries.
The Solana Foundation is committed to offsetting Solana's carbon footprint. Solana is the first Layer 1 blockchain with real-time energy emissions tracking. The emissions tracking software is built directly into Solana nodes and provides dynamic and detailed metrics.
The Solana Foundation encourages all projects and validators to examine their emissions data and implement mitigation strategies. For example, Orca created the Orca Climate Fund ( OCF), a community-backed initiative aimed at promoting a more sustainable climate.
Some climate-focused projects on Solana include:
- GainForest is a Swiss non-profit using Solana transparency and artificial intelligence to combat deforestation
- WaterDAO - a water credit verification organization that is working towards a more decentralized and regenerative water infrastructure
- Sunrise Stake - a decentralized finance dApp with a focus on regenerativeness, aimed at strengthening the Solana blockchain and leveraging rewards for staking to offset carbon emissions
- As stewards of both technological progress and environmental sustainability, Solana has a responsibility to support and invest in solutions that align with these values. Solana's commitment to energy efficiency serves as a model worth considering - it offers a carbon-neutral blockchain with an annual carbon footprint of 9,579 tons of CO2 and a net carbon impact of zero. This commitment to energy efficiency is deeply embedded in the network's core architecture, making it an attractive choice for environmentally-conscious businesses.
Enabled environments Solana
Internal infrastructure
For businesses that need to comply with specific regulatory or compliance requirements, blockchain offers a flexible solution. A blockchain does not have to be a large, permissionless network. Instead, businesses can choose a permissioned blockchain, which uses a shared, immutable ledger that only authorized participants can access. Network participants can control what information is visible to each organization or participant, and what actions each can take. In such an environment, business partners do not necessarily trust each other. Trust is built into the blockchain design, allowing for greater transparency and verifiability.
While blockchain has the potential for cost efficiencies through streamlined change and automation, it is important to note that actual savings may vary depending on specific use cases, existing infrastructure, and a number of other operational cost factors (clerical errors, paperwork and other expenses).
Solana Permissioned Environments (SPEs) provide businesses with non-standard requirements the ability to use Solana. Enterprises can run their own instances of Solana in a dedicated environment that provides all the benefits of Solana tailored to their specific needs. SPE offers high throughput, parallelization, affordable fees, fast settlement times and low environmental impact.
Solana comes with a set of proprietary innovations that eliminate the need for third-party tools. These include state compression, support for the Solidity programming language, programmatic ways to create bridges between different blockchains, and built-in support for zk-proofs. Solana's new token standard, Token22, introduces a number of features such as confidential transfers and transfer functionality, further enhancing the capabilities of businesses building SPEs.
VISA: Why companies choose Solana
Growing interest from institutional and corporate sectors in blockchain technology is evident in the field of payments and digital currencies. Visa, one of the first major payment networks to experiment with stablecoin settlement on Ethereum, recently expanded its pilot program to include both issuing and acquiring partners as well as Solana.
In Visa's extensive review of Solana, they highlight the network's potential for payments and Solana's success in its stablecoin settlement pilot program. The review notes:
Solana holds promise for payments, making it a good candidate for enabling efficient blockchain settlements using stablecoins such as USDC.
The review also compares Solana's capabilities to other leading blockchains and finds that Solana consistently scores the highest. While Solana's current throughput does not match Visa's own 65,000 TPS capabilities, it has the potential to scale beyond current limitations.
Shopify has also integrated with Solana Pay to give merchants more payment choices for their consumers. Discord has also added Solana integration for related roles, which is a first for any blockchain. Google Cloud has also become a validator on Solana.
Helium: Why blockchain projects choose Solana
Existing blockchain projects are also choosing to migrate to Solana. This is the case with Helium, a decentralized LoRaWAN network that provides individual hotspots in more than 170 countries and 5G service in some American cities. Helium aims to build a decentralized wireless infrastructure to support Internet of Things (IoT) devices. To do this, they created a new protocol called LongFi, which combined the capabilities of LoRaWAN with its own Helium blockchain. Users could purchase and maintain their own access points and receive tokens in exchange for providing nodes for the network. These nodes are like miniature cell towers, creating a peer-to-peer wireless network of small, low-power devices connected over very long distances.
HIP 70 was proposed by the Helium development team to improve operational efficiency by migrating Helium from its native blockchain to Solana. The proposal noted that this migration would allow the Helium ecosystem to achieve higher uptime, greater compositeness, faster user experience while maintaining high security and low cost of use. The Helium community voted overwhelmingly in favor of this proposal, and Helium migrated to Solana in April 2023. As part of the migration process, Helium minted each hotspot as an NFT. This was only possible on Solana thanks to state compression; minting compressed NFTs was more economical than minting NFTs on any other network by orders of magnitude. Only Solana Helium could transfer such a large amount of wealth without any problems. Helium Foundation CEO Scott Siegel described the migration:
Smooth and hassle-free. It was boring! This is exactly what we hoped for.
The Helium migration was the first of its kind and was an amazing technological achievement, but blockchain projects are choosing Solana. For example, Maker is an Ethereum project from start to finish. Maker is an Ethereum token that describes itself as a "utility token, governance token, and resource for recapitalizing the Maker system." Maker aims to unlock the potential of decentralized finance by creating an inclusive platform, known as the Maker Platform, for economic development and equitable access to the global financial market. The Maker Platform consists of MakerDAO (to manage the Maker project) and Maker Protocol (to create and facilitate use of DAI, “the world’s first fair-trade currency and leading decentralized stablecoin”). Maker founder Rune Christensen caused a lot of noise in X in September by proposing to start developing the Maker appchain using a fork of the Solana codebase:
Rune Christensen, Founder of Maker
With these developments, it is clear that Solana is becoming increasingly popular choice for established blockchain projects looking to improve operational efficiency, scalability and usability. These developments highlight Solana's growing reputation as a blockchain capable of meeting the diverse needs of established projects.
Eclipse: Why New EVM Solutions Choose Solana
Despite its widespread adoption, Ethereum faces serious scalability challenges. which limit transaction throughput and increase costs. New Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVM) solutions are increasingly turning to Solana due to its unprecedented scalability and efficiency to solve these problems.
Eclipse is a new L2 solution for Ethereum, powered by SVM.
The Eclipse team highlights several key advantages of using SVM over EVM in their article:
- Parallel Processing - The Sealevel runtime allows for parallel processing of transactions, allowing SVM to scale directly with equipment. This is beneficial as processors continue to add more cores at a lower cost, and single-threaded runtimes such as EVMs fundamentally do not benefit from lower per-core costs.
- Wealth Management - Unlike EVM, where state growth is the bottleneck, Solana's approach to state management is much more efficient. All states are merkelized (i.e. hashed into a Merkle tree) after each epoch (~2.5 days), which is cheaper than the real-time merkelization performed by EVM.
- Dynamic account access - in SVM, each transaction specifies all the state needed for execution, eliminating the impact of state size on performance. This allows you to process transactions more reliably and efficiently.
- EVM Compatibility - EVM compatibility through Neon EVM, the ability to compile Solidity smart contract code into SVM bytecode using Solang, and the ability to attract users using MetaMask Snaps are huge advantages for attracting EVM users to the environment , which is not an EVM.
- Security - The Solana runtime prevents recursion exploitation, a common vulnerability that plagues EVMs and has cost projects and users millions of dollars in the past.
- Efficient ZK-proofs - register-based architecture and the smaller instruction set in SVM makes it easier to prove zero knowledge compared to EVM.
Using SVM as a solution for scaling EVM makes sense - it scales better, is more cost-effective, performs better, is easy to implement from -for many compatible features and promotes advanced cryptographic features compared to other current L2 solutions.
Conclusion
Solana stands out as the only blockchain built for scale designed to meet these requirements. Its high performance, low latency and transaction gas make it an obvious choice for any company looking to integrate with blockchains. Combined with Solana's environmental focus, robust security features, and the ability to create multiple runtime environments, it's clear why Solana is becoming the blockchain of choice for companies.
Whether it's an existing blockchain project like Helium, or a traditional company looking to explore the benefits of using blockchains like Visa, Solana is the perfect solution. With innovations like parallel processing and state compression, unified environment is unique to Solana.
