Solana (SOL) processes approximately 70 million transactions per day and recorded more than $143 billion in monthly DEX volume as of October 30, according to DefiLlama.
The network operates with 1,295 consensus validators in 40 countries and a Nakamoto coefficient of 20, according to the Foundation’s June 2025 Network Health Report. Production throughput is approximately 1,100 transactions per second.
The throughput improvements followed a five-hour outage in February 2024. The event prompted the Solana ecosystem to introduce measures such as stake-weighted Quality of Service (QoS), testing with the Firedancer client in hybrid form, and custom validator economics via priority fee routing.
Transaction volume and execution model
Data from DeFiLlama shows that Solana’s monthly DEX volume is approximately $143 billion as of October 30. Ethereum’s volume during the same period was almost $138 billion.
However, Ethereum’s base layer processes fewer than 1.2 million transactions per day, while Solana processes more than 70 million.
Ethereum routes most DeFi activity to layer 2 combinations that process transactions in batches before settling on the base layer. Solana executes all transactions on one layer.
Jake Kennis, senior research analyst at Nansen, attributes Solana’s activities to infrastructure and market catalysts.
In a note he stated:
“Solana’s runtime did the heavy lifting first: Sealevel’s parallel execution, sub-second blocks, stake-weighted QoS via QUIC kept latency low and costs stable under load. That design avoided rollup-style fragmentation and delivered ‘one location, one wallet, one mempool’ commerce.”
Market catalysts included Jito airdrops in 2023, Jupiter airdrops in 2024, memecoin activity via Pump.fun, and wallet integrations from Phantom, Jupiter, and Uniswap.
Compensation structure and congestion response
Solana charges a fixed base fee of 0.000005 SOL per signature plus optional priority fees. During the memecoin wave in early 2024, transactions failed despite users paying priority fees.
Version 1.18 implemented stake-weighted Quality of Service, where block space was allocated proportionally to the validator stake. Messari’s report for the second quarter of last year documented the reduction in congestion after implementing SQoS.
The compensation mechanism remains local and not global. Helius and Eclipse Labs documentation explains that Solana’s parallel transaction scheduler does not uniformly charge all validators based on priority fees paid.
Users can pay too much or too little in relation to the actual network load. SIMD-96 sends all priority fees to validators, which changes the revenue distribution but not the local pricing structure.
Additionally, Jito’s July 2025 TipRouter upgrade will allow validators to distribute priority fees to stakers in addition to protocol-defined staking rewards.
The Foundation’s June 2025 report shows that validator total revenue (ROE) is increasing, while breakeven deployment requirements are decreasing. The majority of the shares previously ran on Jito’s MEV auction infrastructure, with a focus on mining.
SIMD-96 and customer diversity redistribute this surplus. Kennis noted:
“Fewer single-stack dependencies mean fairer execution. Diversification can redistribute the surplus: users win through tighter spreads, LPs see faster arbitrage, and validator margins shrink as tip revenue declines.”
Jupiter Ultra V3 and similar aggregators reduce harmful MEV while preserving arbitrage opportunities.
Customer implementation and failure history
The February 6, 2024 outage lasted five hours and was due to a bug in the Just-in-Time compiler used by the Agave client.
All validators were running the fork of Agave or Jito, which required a coordinated restart of the network. The Foundation’s autopsy report documented the failure.
Firedancer, developed by Jump Crypto in C++, was tested in the hybrid “Frankendancer” mode, where Firedancer handles consensus and networking while Agave manages execution.
The Foundation’s June 2025 report lists dozens of validators using Frankendancer. Laboratory tests showed 1 million TPS.
Two additional clients are in development: Mithril in Go and Sig in Zig.
Knowledge explained:
“Customer diversity hardens the network and allows for better performance. Firedancer and Frankendancer have shown ~1 million TPS in testing; real-world gains depend on rollout. Even with a broader validator geography, QUIC and SW-QoS support consistent throughput.”
In Electric Capital’s Developer Report 2024, Solana ranked first in the number of new developers, with approximately 7,625 new developers that year.
Ethereum retains the most extensive absolute developer base. Solana Mobile Stack integrates wallet, security and browser functionality into Android hardware. Helium migrated its decentralized wireless network to Solana for on-chain settlement.
Ethereum comparison
Ethereum’s base layer has been processing less than 1.2 million transactions per day in recent periods, while achieving similar DEX volume to Solana.
The difference is transaction compression via rollups. Arbitrum, Base and Optimism bundle hundreds of transactions into a single base layer submission.
Data from Token Terminal shows that Ethereum’s EIP-1559 base fee fell in 2025 as Layer 2 activity reduced demand on the base layer.
Solana’s fixed base fee, combined with priority fees, generates lower revenue per transaction, but a higher number of transactions. Total fee income is dependent on sustained transaction volume.
Solana’s monolithic model avoids cross-rollup bridging and maintains uniform liquidity. The trade-off is higher hardware requirements for the validator and stricter coordination needs.
Ethereum’s rollup model distributes operational complexity across Layer 2 operators, but fragments liquidity and introduces trust assumptions regarding sequencers.
Checkpoints
Firedancer’s adoption rate will determine whether Solana achieves customer diversity before the next network stress event. Full Firedancer implementation could enable higher throughput as validators migrate from Agave.
Improvements in the fee market through SIMDs should strengthen the correlation between priority fees paid and the speed of transaction inclusion.
SIMD-96’s fee routing to validators, combined with customer diversity, will test whether validators’ margins shrink as Kennis predicts, or whether throughput gains offset margin pressure.
The post-diversification of the MEV economy will show whether aggregators can successfully reduce harmful extraction while maintaining arbitrage efficiency.
If validator tip revenue becomes more competitive across multi-client deployments, stakers’ APRs may stabilize at lower levels.
The data will show whether Solana’s parallel execution, sub-second finality, and unified liquidity model can scale without the multi-layer fragmentation that Ethereum has adopted, or whether coordination constraints at the base layer ultimately force similar architectural changes.
