Solana Breaks 100K TPS, First Major Blockchain to Hit the Milestone

Solana hit 100,000 TPS in a stress test, and has sparked a debate over real throughput, network upgrades and SOL’s future.

Solana recently hit a peak of more than 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) during a stress test on its mainnet. The network hit 107,540 TPS when validator “Cavey Cool” processed over 43,000 transactions in a single block. 

Even though many of these were no-operation calls, the event showed Solana’s capacity to scale.

This development comes as the Solana token (SOL) trades near $180, while investors await decisions on pending Solana ETF proposals. 

How Solana Reached 100,000 TPS

The record-setting figure with Solana’s TPS speeds resulted from a deliberate stress test. 

Developers used “noop” program calls to carry this out. For context, “noop” program calls are small, lightweight instructions that satisfy Solana’s requirement for every transaction to include at least one command. 

These transactions transfer no tokens or change the state of the blockchain, but can be useful for testing the system’s performance.

Despite criticism that such calls tend to inflate performance numbers, Mert Mumtaz, the co-founder of Helius, argued that noop transactions are not a small deal.

They require signature verification, data loading and other overheads, which means that rather than being referred to as “meaningless spam”, they are similar to operations like low-cost oracle updates.

Put simply, Solana’s architecture can theoretically sustain 80,000 to 100,000 transactions per second, under real conditions like token transfers and oracle feeds.

Real User TPS Tells a Different Story

While the stress test has been all the rage on the internet, actual user activity brings the figures slightly lower.

In particular, data from Solscan shows that Solana averages around 3,600 TPS. However, ⅔ of that comes from validator vote messages required for consensus. 

Real throughput for payments and applications is closer to 900–1,050 TPS (which is still a big deal).

According to Chainspect, meaningful capacity for dapps sits at around 10,000 transactions per second in peak scenarios. This, again, is still far higher than most competitors. However, it is far below the 100,000 figure mentioned during the stress test.

For context, Visa processes about 24,000 TPS, and Mastercard averages 5,000 TPS under real-world conditions. Solana’s current real-use throughput falls short of those of payment networks, even though it leads other blockchains.

Solana Compared to Other Blockchains

Ethereum’s mainnet handles just 22 TPS, even though its Layer 2 solutions scale into the thousands. Binance Smart Chain reaches around 378 TPS, while Polygon averages 190 TPS and Sui records about 854 TPS.

By comparison, Solana has a user-facing throughput of 900–1,050 TPS, which means that it is faster than most of these rivals.

More importantly, Solana has demonstrated that it can scale much higher when conditions demand it.

Finally, the 100K TPS milestone comes around the time of discussions around SIMD-0326, also known as the Alpenglow upgrade. If implemented, Alpenglow could cut finality delays, enhance reliability, and make TPS metrics more accurate to measure.

Market Reaction and Investor Interest

The stress test has bolstered confidence in Solana’s long-term future. Open interest in SOL derivatives recently climbed toward $12 billion, and ETF proposals from Bitwise and 21Shares are also under review by the SEC.

So far, Bloomberg analysts expect decisions by mid-October.

Meanwhile, SOL is still down 38% from its January peak of $293 but continues to attract strong demand. In all, developers and investors will continue to watch how well the network balances speed with reliability in the months to come.