What does it mean for Solana to achieve 100,000 TPS under ideal conditions?

In the past couple of days, discussions around Solana's 10W TPS have increased, because @cavemanloverboy has indeed achieved over 100,000 TPS on the Solana Mainnet, but most people have not understood the significance behind this data:

1. First of all, the cavey experiment is essentially a limit test under "ideal conditions". This means that it is not the normal performance of the Solana Mainnet, and there are differences compared to laboratory data in the testnet environment, but it's not far off.

Because he used the noop (no operation) test program, which, as the name suggests, only performs the most basic signature verification and directly returns success, without executing any calculations, without changing any account status, and without calling other programs. Each transaction is only 200 bytes, far below the normal transaction size of 1kb+.

This means that the 10W TPS test was calculated under abnormal trading conditions. It tests the limit throughput of the Solana network layer and consensus layer, rather than the actual processing capacity of the application layer.

2. Another key to the success of this experiment is the Frankendancer validator client. Simply put, Frankendancer is a "hybrid test version" of the Firedancer validator that Jump Crypto is developing—integrating the high-performance components of Firedancer that have been completed into the existing Solana validator.

In fact, it is essentially a reconfiguration of the Solana node system using the high-frequency trading technology stack from Wall Street, achieving performance improvements through fine memory management, custom thread scheduling, and other underlying optimizations. However, simply replacing certain components can achieve a performance increase of 3-5 times.

3. This test experiment shows that Solana can achieve TPS of over 100,000 under ideal conditions. So why is the daily TPS only 3,000-4,000? In summary, there are roughly three reasons:

1. Solana's POH consensus mechanism requires Validators to continuously vote to maintain it, and these voting transactions account for over 70% of the block space, which narrows the performance channel left for normal transactions; 2. Solana's ecosystem activities often experience a large amount of state contention, for example, when Minting new NFTs or releasing new MEMEs, there can be thousands of transactions competing for write permissions on the same account, resulting in a high failure rate of transactions;

2. Arbitrage bots existing in the Solana ecosystem may send a large number of invalid transactions to capture MEV benefits, resulting in resource waste.

4. However, the upcoming full deployment of Firedancer and the consensus upgrade of Alpenglow will systematically address these issues.

One of the key points of the Alpenglow consensus upgrade is the transfer of voting transactions off-chain, which effectively frees up 70% of the space for normal transactions, while also reducing the confirmation time to 150 milliseconds, allowing the DEX experience on Solana to be infinitely close to that of CEX. In addition, the activation of a local fee market can also prevent the embarrassing situation of network congestion caused by the Fomo frenzy of a single program.

In addition to performance optimization improvements, the benefits of Firedancer are crucially realized in the diversity of clients, allowing Solana to have multiple clients like Geth and Nethermind, similar to Ethereum, which directly enhances decentralization and single point of node failure.

Above.

So, the discussion about Solana's 10W TPS is actually a reflection of confidence in the future upgrades of Solana's client and consensus protocol for those who understand the field. Those who don't understand are trying to give Solana a sense of existence through a TPS arms race (even though TPS competition is outdated). However, if one understands the significance behind the experiment, there are still quite a few gains to be had. Let me share some popular science with you all.