Solana, the blockchain renowned for its impressive speeds, has a more profound mission than just achieving high throughput, according to Anatoly Yakovenko, the co-founder of Solana Labs. Contrary to popular belief, Yakovenko explained that Solana’s core objective goes beyond transaction speed.
Yakovenko, also known as “toly” on the social platform X, emphasized that Solana’s development primarily aimed to synchronize the global state as quickly as physics would allow, rather than solely maximizing throughput. This nuanced perspective reveals the broader ambitions of Solana’s architecture and its dedication to optimizing information flow worldwide.
Solana’s architecture is specially designed to synchronize information at the speed of light, with a focus on minimizing latency and maximizing throughput. However, this approach does come with trade-offs. In order to achieve its goals, the platform is willing to sacrifice some degree of verifiability. It utilizes innovative features such as its proof of history (PoH) mechanism and the Turbine block propagation protocol as part of a broader strategy to ensure efficient global state synchronization.
Interestingly, Solana isn’t even designed for maximum throughput. Its primary goal is to synchronize state to as many devices worldwide as quickly as physics allows.
According to a recent report by CoinGecko, Solana has emerged as the fastest among major blockchain networks. On April 6, during a surge in meme coin transactions, Solana’s network achieved an average of 1,504 transactions per second (TPS), surpassing Ethereum and even Polygon, a leading Ethereum scaling solution.
Despite these impressive figures, Yakovenko stresses that high throughput is a byproduct and not the main objective. Solana’s aim is to enhance the global synchronization of state, ensuring that its system can handle vast amounts of data with unparalleled efficiency. This approach has allowed Solana to be 46 times faster than Ethereum and achieve only 1.6% of its theoretical maximum speed of 65,000 TPS.
