Solana News Today: Solana's 10,000 TPS: Why Blockchain Is Outpacing Traditional Finance in Speed

Solana's blockchain demonstrated its capacity to process 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) during a period of heightened market activity in late 2025, underscoring its position as a high-performance alternative to Ethereum. This achievement occurred amid surging demand for decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, non-fungible token (NFT) transactions, and tokenized asset settlements, which strained network throughput on competing platforms. The network's ability to maintain low fees-averaging below $0.002 per transaction-during this period further highlighted its scalability advantages The Motley Fool^[1].

The surge in transaction volume was supported by recent upgrades to Solana's infrastructure, including a 20% increase in block capacity from 50 million to 60 million compute units (CUs) in July 2025. This adjustment, part of a broader effort to enhance throughput, enabled the network to process over 1,700 true TPS in real-world conditions CoinCentral^[2]. Developers are now advancing a proposal to raise the block limit to 100 million CUs under Solana Improvement Document (SIMD-0286), which could theoretically push TPS to 1 million if implemented successfully SolanaFloor^[3].

The network's performance gains are attributed to innovations such as the Firedancer validator client, which entered testing in late 2025. This upgrade aims to optimize consensus mechanisms and reduce latency, allowing Solana to outpace both Ethereum and traditional payment networks in transaction finality The Motley Fool^[1]. Analysts noted that the network's ability to handle 10,000 TPS during volatile periods-such as those driven by meme coin rallies or institutional tokenization initiatives-reinforced its appeal for applications requiring real-time processing CoinCentral^[4].

Institutional interest in Solana's infrastructure also accelerated in 2025, with major banks piloting tokenized municipal bonds and money market funds on the chain. These initiatives, coupled with credit rating trials by firms like Moody's, signaled growing confidence in Solana as a settlement layer for traditional finance The Motley Fool^[1]. Meanwhile, the network's total value locked (TVL) rose 8% in 30 days to $14.2 billion, securing its position as the second-largest blockchain by TVL CoinCentral^[4].

Despite its technical strengths, challenges remain. Critics have raised concerns about centralization risks, as Solana's validator set is smaller and relies heavily on high-performance hardware. Network outages in previous years, including a 20-hour downtime in 2023, have also fueled debates about reliability. However, developers emphasized that the Firedancer upgrade and ongoing capacity expansions are designed to mitigate these issues CryptoNews^[5].

The market chaos context included a surge in decentralized exchange (DEX) volumes, with platforms like Pump, Meteora, and Raydium reporting 78%, 73%, and 46% increases in seven-day activity, respectively. Solana's dominance in transaction count-processing more than Ethereum and its layer-2 ecosystem combined-further illustrated its role as a preferred infrastructure for high-frequency trading and DeFi protocols CoinCentral^[4].