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 stands at approximately 1,100 transactions per second.
The throughput improvements follow a five-hour outage in February 2024. The event prompted the Solana ecosystem to introduce metrics such as stake-weighted quality of service (QoS), testing with the Firedancer client in hybrid form, and adjusted economics for validators via priority fee routing.
Trading volume and execution model
DeFiLlama data shows that Solana’s monthly spot DEX volume stood at approximately $143 billion as of October 30. Ethereum volume during the same period reached almost $138 billion.
However, Ethereum’s base layer processes less than 1.2 million transactions per day, while Solana processes more than 70 million.
Ethereum routes most DeFi activity to Layer 2 rollups that aggregate transactions before settling on the base layer. Solana executes all transactions on a single layer.
Jake Kennis, senior research analyst at Nansen, attributes Solana’s activity to infrastructure and market catalysts.
In a note he said:
“Solana’s execution engine did the heavy lifting first: Sealevel’s parallel execution, sub-second blocks, stake-weighted QoS on QUIC kept latency low and fees stable under load. This design avoided rollup fragmentation and enabled ‘one location, one wallet, one memory pool’ trading.”
Market catalysts included Jito airdrops in 2023, Jupiter airdrops in 2024, memecoin activity through Pump.fun, and wallet integrations from Phantom, Jupiter, and Uniswap.
Pricing structure and response to congestion
Solana charges a flat base fee of 0.000005 SOL per signature plus an optional priority fee. During the memecoin surge in early 2024, transactions failed despite users paying priority fees.
Version 1.18 implemented stake-weighted QoS, allocating block space proportional to the validator’s stake. Messari’s report for the second quarter of last year documented the reduction in congestion following the deployment of SQoS.
The pricing mechanism remains local rather than global. Documentation from Helius and Eclipse Labs explains that Solana’s parallel transaction scheduler does not uniformly price inclusion across all validators based on priority fees paid.
Users can overpay or underpay relative to the actual network load. SIMD-96 routes all priority fees to validators, thereby changing the revenue distribution but not the local fee structure.
Additionally, Jito’s July 2025 TipRouter upgrade allows validators to distribute priority fees to stakers along with protocol-defined staking rewards.
The Foundation’s June 2025 report indicates that validator total revenue (REV) is increasing, while stake balance requirements are decreasing. Most stakes previously relied on Jito’s MEV auction infrastructure, focusing on mining.
SIMD-96 and the diversity of clienteles redistribute this surplus. Kennis noted:
“Fewer single-stack dependencies mean fairer execution. Diversification can redistribute surplus: users win through tighter spreads, LPs see faster arbitrage, and validator margins compress as tip revenue declines.”
Jupiter Ultra V3 and similar aggregators reduce harmful MEVs while preserving arbitrage opportunities.
Customer implementation and failure history
The outage on February 6, 2024 lasted five hours and stemmed from a bug in the Just-in-Time compiler used by the Agave client.
All validators were running either the Agave fork or the Jito fork, requiring a coordinated network restart. The Foundation’s autopsy documented the failure.
Firedancer, developed by Jump Crypto in C++, entered testing in hybrid “Frankendancer” mode, where Firedancer handles consensus and networking while Agave handles execution.
The Foundation’s June 2025 report noted dozens of validators running Frankendancer. Laboratory tests have demonstrated 1 million TPS.
Two additional clients are in development, Mithril in Go and Sig in Zig.
Kennis explained:
“Client diversity strengthens the network and opens up performance headroom. Firedancer and Frankendancer showed approximately 1 million TPS in testing; actual gains depend on deployment. Even with a broader validation geography, QUIC and SW-QoS maintain consistent throughput.”
Electric Capital’s 2024 Developer Report ranked Solana first in terms of new developer additions, with approximately 7,625 new developers that year.
Ethereum maintains the largest absolute developer base. Solana Mobile Stack integrates wallet, security, and browser functionality into Android hardware. Helium has migrated its decentralized wireless network to Solana for on-chain settlement.
Ethereum Comparison
Ethereum’s base layer has processed fewer than 1.2 million transactions per day in recent periods while achieving DEX volume comparable to Solana.
The difference lies in the compression of transactions via rollups. Arbitrum, Base and Optimism consolidate hundreds of transactions into a single base layer submission.
Token Terminal data shows that Ethereum’s EIP-1559 base fees have declined in 2025 as Layer 2 activity reduces demand on the base layer.
Solana’s fixed base fees, combined with priority fees, generate lower revenue per transaction but a higher number of transactions. Total fee income depends on sustained trading volume.
Solana’s monolithic model avoids cross-bridges and maintains unified liquidity. The trade-off is higher validation hardware requirements and stricter coordination needs.
Ethereum’s rollup model distributes operational complexity to Layer 2 operators, but it fragments liquidity and introduces trust assumptions related to sequencers.
Monitoring points
Firedancer’s adoption rate will determine whether Solana can diversify its customers before the next network stress event. Full deployment of Firedancer could enable higher throughput if validators migrate from Agave.
Improvements in the fee market through SIMDs are expected to tighten the correlation between priority fees paid and the speed of transaction inclusion.
The routing of SIMD-96 fees to validators, combined with customer diversity, will test whether validator margins are compressing as Kennis predicts, or whether throughput gains offset margin pressure.
Post-diversification MEV economics will show whether aggregators succeed in reducing harmful extraction while maintaining arbitrage efficiency.
If validator tip revenues become more competitive in multiple client implementations, stakeholder 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 adopted by Ethereum, or whether base layer coordination constraints end up forcing similar architectural changes.
