Solana, the blockchain platform renowned for its exceptional speed, has always been more than just a high throughput achiever. Anatoly Yakovenko, the co-founder of Solana Labs, recently revisited the core mission of Solana, shedding light on its foundational goals. Contrary to popular belief, Yakovenko emphasized that Solana’s primary objective goes beyond transaction speed.
Yakovenko, known as “toly” on the social platform X, highlighted that Solana’s development was focused on synchronizing the global state as quickly as physically possible, rather than solely prioritizing throughput.
Solana’s architecture is intricately designed to synchronize information at the speed of light, with a key focus on minimizing latency and maximizing throughput. However, this approach does require some trade-offs.
The platform deliberately sacrifices a degree of verifiability in pursuit of its goals, leveraging innovative features like the proof of history (PoH) mechanism and the Turbine block propagation protocol. These innovations form part of a comprehensive strategy to ensure effective global state synchronization.
Solana isn’t just about achieving maximum throughput; it is designed to synchronize state across the world as swiftly as the laws of physics allow.
In a recent report by CoinGecko, Solana was identified as the fastest among major blockchain networks. On April 6, during a surge in meme coin transactions, Solana’s network recorded an average of 1,504 transactions per second (TPS), surpassing Ethereum and Polygon, a prominent Ethereum scaling solution.
Despite Solana’s impressive performance figures, Yakovenko stresses that high throughput is a secondary outcome, not the primary objective. Solana’s true aim is to enhance global state synchronization, enabling its system to efficiently handle vast amounts of data. This approach has positioned Solana as 46 times faster than Ethereum, achieving only 1.6% of its theoretical maximum speed of 65,000 TPS.