When people talk about Solana handling up to 65,000 transactions per second (TPS) compared to Ethereum’s 20–30 TPS, the secret lies not in a single feature, but in a carefully designed architecture.
This article explains the core components responsible for Solana’s speed.
1. Proof of History (PoH) – The Cryptographic Clock
Definition: PoH is a cryptographic timestamping mechanism, not a consensus mechanism. It provides a verifiable way to know the order of events without needing all validators to synchronize their clocks.This way we can have a centralized ordering mechanism followed by everyone.
Analogy: Imagine a drum beating “boom… boom… boom” repeatedly. Every transaction is tagged to a drum beat, giving a shared timeline of actions.
Everyone hearing the beat gets to know the ordering of transaction beat-wise.
Technical Function: PoH uses a hash chain (SHA-256) where each hash depends on the previous one. Transactions are inserted into this hash sequence to fix their order.
Benefit: Validators do not need to spend time agreeing on transaction order, reducing latency and enabling faster block creation.
2. Proof of Stake (PoS) – Leader Selection and Validation
Definition:Proof of Stake (PoS) decides who produces a block and who validates it. Validators lock up SOL tokens, and the more they stake, the higher their chance of being chosen as a leader.
who are validators ?
Validators are nodes (computers) that:
- Produce new blocks when selected as leaders.
- Validate blocks proposed by others.
- Get rewarded for honest participation.
- Risk losing their staked tokens if they cheat.
Analogy: Imagine referees in a game. One is chosen as the main referee (leader) to manage the match, while others check the referee’s decisions.
Technical Function:
- Leaders produce blocks with ordered transactions.
- Other validators vote on block validity using Tower BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerance optimized with PoH).
- Misbehaving leaders lose their stake.
together with PoH :
- PoH orders transactions.
- PoS ensures security.
Result → fast block production with trust.
3. How Solana Achieves Fast Transaction Speed
No Ordering Delays: PoH ensures transactions are already ordered.
Sealevel Runtime: Parallel Execution: Transactions declare which accounts they will read/write.Non-overlapping transactions are grouped into subsets and executed in parallel.
Hardware Utilization: Rust multithreading allows full use of CPU cores and GPUs.
Other Optimizations:
- Gulf Stream: Forwards transactions to the future leader ahead of time.
- Turbine: Breaks blocks into small packets for fast network propagation.
- Pipeline: Optimized block validation across CPU cores.
- Cloudbreak: High-performance storage structure for account data.
4. Subsets – The Core of Parallel Execution
Definition: A subset is a group of transactions that can be executed in parallel because they do not touch the same accounts.
Formation: Transactions are divided based on account overlap. Non-overlapping transactions →
same subset (parallel). Overlapping → different subset (sequential).
Example:
TX1 → (A, B), TX2 → (C), TX3 → (D, E), TX4 → (B, F)
Subset 1: TX1, TX2, TX3 (parallel)
Subset 2: TX4 (sequential)
Analogy: Like teams in different locations in a game fighting independently (parallel) or in the same
location (sequential).
so transactions in the same subsets are executed parallely in multiple cores of machine and each subset is executed sequentially, avoiding the problem where two transaction try to read/write to same account.
5. Comparison with Ethereum
- Consensus
- Ethereum: PoW (before) / PoS (now)
- Solana: PoS + PoH
- Transaction Ordering
- Ethereum: Validators choose from the mempool
- Solana: PoH cryptographically orders transactions
- Execution
- Ethereum: Sequential (one transaction after another)
- Solana: Parallel execution via subsets (multiple transactions at once)
- Block Time
- Ethereum: ~12 seconds
- Solana: ~400 milliseconds
- Throughput
- Ethereum: ~15–30 TPS
- Solana: 3,000–5,000 TPS (theoretical limit of 65,000+)
- MEV (Maximal Extractable Value)
- Ethereum: High (validators reorder transactions for profit)
- Solana: Minimal (transactions already pre-ordered by PoH)
- Hardware Usage
- Ethereum: Limited hardware utilization
- Solana: Full use of multi-core CPUs and GPUs
6. Summary – Why Solana is So Fast
PoH: Orders transactions cryptographically.
PoS: Efficient block production and validation.
Subsets + Sealevel: Parallel execution of non-overlapping transactions.
Rust Multithreading & Hardware: Full utilization of CPU/GPU cores.
Network & Block Optimizations: Reduce latency.
So, that’s what makes Solana blazing fast and adaptive compared to giants like Ethereum.
Want me to break down more of Solana’s architecture? Drop a comment below 👇
Happy Weekend, folks 🚀✨
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