Base vs Solana: The 200ms FlashBlock Challenge

Base and Solana, two prominent blockchain platforms, have recently sparked a debate over their respective scaling capabilities. The dispute centers around the announcement of Base's new feature, FlashBlocks, which aims to reduce its effective block times to 200 milliseconds, half the time it takes Solana to create new blocks.

Solana followers have been quick to point out the nuances of this comparison. While FlashBlocks do allow for early confirmation times, Base's full block times will still be two seconds. Solana, on the other hand, has a feature called shreds that operates similarly to FlashBlocks, but its full block times are 400 milliseconds.

The debate highlights a common issue in blockchain scaling conversations: the lack of clear metrics and context. When Base's creator, Jesse Pollak, claims that Base will be "2x faster than" Solana, he doesn't specify how he's measuring speed or why that would matter for Base's developers and users. Similarly, when Firedancer developers claim that the Solana client can process one million transactions per second in a test environment, it's important to consider whether that speed could be maintained in the real world.

Even if Firedancer could process one million transactions per second, it's worth noting that Solana is currently processing roughly 1,000 user TPS. This suggests that while Firedancer's theoretical capacity is impressive, it may not significantly impact Solana's real-world performance.

In a recent podcast episode, NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin discussed scaling with Lightspeed's Mert Mumtaz. Polosukhin and fellow NEAR developer Bowen Wang claimed that NEAR will soon bring its block times down to 400 milliseconds and that its blockchain shards can handle 10,000-20,000 TPS each. Despite these impressive numbers, Mumtaz asked why no one is talking about NEAR's scalability.

Polosukhin responded that many projects claim to be scalable but haven't proven their capabilities under real-world conditions. He also emphasized the importance of discussing use cases rather than just throwing out marketing numbers. While 200 ms block times and one million TPS sound impressive, they don't necessarily translate to meaningful value if the blockchain doesn't support practical use cases.