Did Solana process more transactions than all other blockchains last week?
Any casual observer of blockchain dashboards might have been impressed with Solana last week as its 355 million transactions seemingly outpaced all other blockchains across that seven-day period.
Supporting the view that Solana needs extra capacity to accommodate demand, engineers implemented SIMD-0207 to increase the blockchain’s block size by 4%.
However, the headline that its transactions surpassed all other blockchains drastically overstates Solana’s meaningful usage. In contrast to Solana’s mostly computational, non-financial transactions, transactions on other blockchains are predominantly authorizations to move actual money.
For example, in contrast to the Bitcoin blockchain, where the overwhelming majority of transactions involve the movement of funds, Solana’s blockchain is mostly filled with “program interactions.” These non-financial voting actions among proof-of-stake participants are tantamount to computers sending commands to one another.
Read more: TRX on Solana makes as much sense as ETH on Bitcoin
In other words, it doesn’t make sense to compare Solana transactions to third-party blockchains whose users are looking to trade, stake, or otherwise utilize them for a financial purpose.
Solana’s true transactions are at least 75% less
As of publication time, most dashboards excluded three-quarters of Solana transactions from its more realistic True Transactions Per Minute (TPS) metric. The tacit acknowledgment of Solana’s unusual processing level is evident in a starting point for analysis already one-fourth below the headline figure.
Ultimately, while Solana’s impressive transaction counts highlight its ability to store data, transaction counts alone don’t equate to meaningful blockchain activity.
Indeed, the majority of Solana’s transactions are internal program interactions, which differ fundamentally from the financial transactions that dominate other networks.
For an apples-to-apples assessment of blockchain adoption, it’s essential to consider the purpose of transactions, not just their quantity.
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