A weekend publish on X from the official Solana account ignited a contemporary spherical of cross-chain sniping after it juxtaposed the Ethereum community’s transaction velocity with Nasdaq’s commerce throughput. “Once they say the way forward for markets runs at 22 TPS however NASDAQ handles 2k trades per second,” Solana wrote on August 9, implicitly positioning the layer-1 as higher aligned with trendy market plumbing.
Ethereum customers bristled, arguing the comparability was a class error between an open, permissionless blockchain and a closed, centralized trade community. The sharpest rebuttal got here from the pseudonymous researcher polynya (@apolynya), who has 94,000 followers on X.
Once they say the way forward for markets runs at 22 TPS however NASDAQ handles 2k trades per second pic.twitter.com/TAsGAcFc7k
— Solana (@solana) August 9, 2025
Solana Vs. Ethereum
In an in depth publish, polynya argued that the technical baselines underlying US equities infrastructure dwarf something a minimally decentralized layer-1 can obtain beneath world consensus. “Nasdaq’s SIP is designed to deal with 10 million operations per second, with a latency of 0.02 milliseconds (although realistically, constrained by velocity of sunshine, it nonetheless will get to 0.2 ms between NYSE or Cboe and Nasdaq), and is quickly parallelisable for infinite throughput. (There are three SIPs working presently.),” polynya wrote.
From that premise, the conclusion was blunt: “Given the crippling limitation of reaching strict world consensus, Nasdaq will perpetually be hundreds of instances sooner and cheaper than any minimally decentralised L1 blockchain, wanting unique new physics that doesn’t but exist.”
Polynya added that if blockchains need to strategy real-time markets, they have to lean on succinct cryptography slightly than uncooked TPS. “The one recognized methodology to get wherever shut is by utilizing ZK proofs as a substitute for real-time execution and deferring & rushing up strict world consensus by orders of magnitude (as you solely want to realize consensus on a succinct proof as a substitute of hundreds of thousands of transactions), and even then, it’ll price orders of magnitude extra, will take years to mature, and it’s not an acceptable use of this tech as Nasdaq doesn’t require strict world consensus anyway.”
The publish ended with an indictment of the metric itself: “Completely wild that cryptobros are nonetheless coping about ‘TPS’ prefer it’s 2017 as a substitute of constructing purposes that make individuals’s lives higher. (Degenerate playing doesn’t.)”
Solana Labs founder Anatoly Yakovenko (@aeyakovenko) pushed again on each the framing and the cryptographic treatment. He first contended that “Zk proofs are at all times slower than classical execution.” Increasing on that, Yakovenko argued the equities-style comparability—if one is to be made—needs to be about consumption ensures and scheduling slightly than block TPS or consensus latency.
“Nasdaq requires that each message is included, and that every one messages are handled the identical,” he wrote, earlier than pointing to how precedence charges alter inclusion on blockchains: “The best way that precedence charges work is that any txs with a precedence charge decrease than the ground inclusion value within the block doesn’t get included. So the comparability to Nasdaq that issues is scheduler throughput and latency, not block tps or consensus latency. You possibly can have 10 second blocks with 1000 tps, and a scheduler on the block producer that may reliably inform the dealer that their tx is included in microseconds.”
From an financial perspective, Yakovenko advised Solana’s design already drives the price of marginal drops towards irrelevance. “If the ground precedence charge is < unfold / Okay for a fairly small Okay, then together with extra messages isn't going to enhance spreads. Solana already achieved this. The ground inclusion value is a fraction of a foundation level, which implies that extra dropped messages have an financial worth of lower than a foundation level. Dropping them vs together with them has almost zero marginal distinction.”
The False impression About ZK Proofs
He later returned to the ZK debate to emphasize the place proofs do and don’t assist. “I don’t perceive the place individuals get this false impression that ZK proofs are sooner or can someway make a system sooner. It’s fully improper. They’ll decrease among the prices for replication, however they’ll’t enhance efficiency if replication price isn’t a blocker.”
Yakovenko illustrated the purpose with a bandwidth-versus-execution thought experiment: “Let’s assume that zk proofs are fully free and prompt. If sizeof(tx) < sizeof(state change) then it’s almost at all times sooner to obtain the tx and execute it regionally as a result of native reminiscence bandwidth and latency is best than community bandwidth and latency. It will take extra time to obtain the state consequence from the transaction than downloading the transaction itself and utilizing native copy of the state to execute it and produce the consequence.”
His backside line focused Ethereum’s price mannequin: “So the one place the place zk proofs really assist is that if replication is pricey. The place is replication insanely costly? On ethereum L1. It’s cheaper to publish a state root and a zk proof so the L1 can skip executing all of the state.”
Solana group developer João Mendonça (@joaomendoncaaaa) argued that Solana’s ambition is to not equal Nasdaq’s uncooked velocity. “the purpose of solana as a alternative for nasdaq is to not be as quick as nasdaq itself,” he wrote, however to supply comparable execution costs “with 1000x the accessibility, worldwide, [without] asking for permission, 24/7, with uncensorable asset possession and portability all through all of defi.”
At press time, SOL traded at $174.34.
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