According to DefiLlama, Solana (SOL) processes approximately 70 million transactions per day and recorded more than $143 billion in monthly DEX trading volume as of October 30.
According to the foundation’s June 2025 network health report, the network operates with 1,295 consensus verifiers in 40 countries and a Nakamoto coefficient of 20. Production throughput runs at approximately 1,100 transactions per second.
The throughput enhancement followed a five-hour outage in February 2024. This event prompted the Solana ecosystem to introduce measures such as stake-focused quality of service (QoS), testing with a hybrid form of Firedancer client, and adjusted validator economics with priority fee routing.
Trading volume and execution model
As of October 30, Solana’s spot monthly DEX trading volume was approximately $143 billion, according to DeFiLlama data. During the same period, Ethereum’s trading volume reached approximately $138 billion.
However, Ethereum’s base layer processes less than 1.2 million transactions per day, while Solana processes over 70 million transactions.
Ethereum routes most DeFi activity to a layer 2 rollup, which batches transactions before resolving them at the base layer. Solana executes all transactions in a single layer.
Jake Kenneth, senior research analyst at Nansen, attributes Solana’s activity to infrastructure and market catalysts.
In his notes, he said:
“Solana’s runtime did the heavy lifting initially. Sealevel’s parallel execution, sub-second blocks, and stake-weighted QoS on QUIC kept latency low and fees stable under load. Its design avoided rollup-style fragmentation and enabled “one venue, one wallet, one pool” transactions. ”
Market drivers include Jito airdrop in 2023, Jupiter airdrop in 2024, memecoin activity via Pump.fun, wallet integrations from Phantom, Jupiter, and Uniswap, and more.
Fee structure and handling of congestion
Solana charges a fixed base fee of 0.000005 SOL per signature plus an optional priority fee. During the memecoin rally in early 2024, transactions failed even though users paid priority fees.
In version 1.18, we implemented a stake-weighted quality of service by allocating block space proportional to a validator’s stake. Messari’s report for the second quarter of last year documented the reduction in congestion after implementing SQoS.
The pricing mechanism remains local rather than global. Helius and Eclipse Labs documentation explains that Solana’s parallel transaction scheduler does not uniformly price inclusions across all validators based on the priority fee paid.
Users can overpay or underpay compared to the actual network load. SIMD-96 routes all priority fees to validators and changes revenue distribution, but does not change the local pricing structure.
Additionally, Jito’s July 2025 TipRouter upgrade will allow validators to distribute priority fees to stakers along with protocol-defined staking rewards.
The Foundation’s June 2025 report shows that validator gross revenue (REV) is increasing while break-even staking requirements are decreasing. Previously, most stocks operated on Jito’s MEV auction infrastructure and focused on extraction.
SIMD-96 and client diversity are redistributing this surplus. Kenneth pointed out:
“Less single-stack dependencies mean execution is fairer. Diversification can redistribute surplus. Users can profit through tighter spreads, LPs experience faster arbitrage, and validators’ margins are compressed as tip income declines.”
Jupiter Ultra V3 and similar aggregators reduce harmful MEV while preserving arbitrage opportunities.
Client implementation and outage history
The February 6, 2024 outage lasted five hours and was caused by a bug in the just-in-time compiler used by the Agave client.
All validators ran a fork of Agave or Jito, which required them to adjust and restart their networks. Foundation post-mortem investigation recorded failure.
Developed in C++ by Jump Crypto, Firedancer went into testing in a hybrid “Frankendancer” mode. In this mode, Firedancer handles consensus and networking, and Agave manages execution.
The Foundation’s June 2025 report lists dozens of validators running Frankedancer. Lab tests have demonstrated 1 million TPS.
Two more clients are in development: Mithril in Go and Sig in Zig.
Kenneth explained:
“Client diversity strengthens the network and creates performance headroom. Firedancer and Frankendancer have shown up to 1 million TPS in testing, but actual benefits will depend on rollout. QUIC and SW-QoS maintain consistent throughput even when validators have wide geographic coverage.”
Electric Capital’s 2024 Developer Report ranked Solana No. 1 for new developer additions, with approximately 7,625 new developers that year.
Ethereum holds the absolute widest developer base. Solana Mobile Stack integrates wallet, security, and browser functionality into Android hardware. Helium migrates its decentralized wireless network to Solana for on-chain payments.
Ethereum comparison
Recent Ethereum baselayers processed less than 1.2 million transactions per day while achieving comparable DEX volumes to Solana.
The difference is transaction compression through rollups. Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism combine hundreds of transactions into a single base layer submission.
According to Token Terminal data, Ethereum’s EIP-1559 base fee decreased in 2025 as layer 2 activity reduced base layer demand.
The combination of Solana’s fixed base fee and priority fee results in lower revenue per transaction, but a higher number of transactions. Total fee income depends on sustained trading volume.
Solana’s monolithic model avoids cross-rollup bridging and maintains uniform liquidity. The tradeoff is higher hardware requirements for validators and tighter coordination.
Ethereum’s rollup model distributes operational complexity to layer 2 operators, but it fragments liquidity and introduces trust assumptions related to sequencers.
monitoring point
Firedancer’s adoption rate determines whether Solana can achieve client diversity before the next network stress event. If validators are migrating from Agave, fully deploying Firedancer can potentially improve throughput.
SIMD’s improvements to the fee market should strengthen the correlation between preferred fees paid and trade uptake speed.
We will test whether SIMD-96’s fee routing to validators, combined with client diversity, compresses validator margins as Kenneth predicts, or whether increased throughput offsets margin pressures.
Post-diversification MEV economics shows whether aggregators can successfully reduce harmful extraction while maintaining arbitrage efficiency.
If validator chip revenues become more competitive among multiple client implementations, staker APRs may stabilize at a lower level.
This data will indicate whether Solana’s parallel execution, sub-second finality, and unified liquidity model can scale without the multi-layer fragmentation that Ethereum employs, or whether base layer coordination constraints will ultimately force similar architectural changes.