Solana, a popular blockchain known for fast and low-cost transactions, briefly reached over 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) this past weekend, according to Mert Mumtaz, Co-Founder of Solana developer tooling firm Helius.
The spike happened late Sunday, August 17, when a single Solana block processed 43,016 successful transactions and 50 failures, totaling 107,540 TPS. This made Solana the first major blockchain to briefly hit six-figure TPS on its mainnet.
Most transactions, however, were “noop” program calls, instructions that don’t perform real actions but meet Solana’s requirement that each transaction includes at least one instruction. These lightweight calls stress-test the network and do not reflect everyday token transfers or trades.
Mumtaz said developers could estimate that Solana might theoretically handle 80,000–100,000 TPS for real operations, such as token transfers or oracle updates (information feeds for blockchain apps).
In practice, however, the network is much slower. Solscan reports about 3,700 TPS, but two-thirds are vote transactions from validators, the nodes that approve blocks. Real throughput is closer to 1,000 TPS, according to Solscan and Chainspect.
Despite this, Solana activity remains strong. Memecoins dominate, with Pump.fun, a memecoin minting and trading platform, holding 62% of total value locked in Solana’s decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.
The SOL token was trading at $183.35 at the time of writing, down 5.15%, falling from $208 last week and 36% below its January peak of $293, according to CoinMarketCap.
Also Read: Solana Memecoins: WIF, PENGU, Fartcoin Drop Over 10% in a Week
