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 pace 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 below international 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 pace of sunshine, it nonetheless will get to 0.2 ms between NYSE or Cboe and Nasdaq), and is instantly parallelisable for infinite throughput. (There are three SIPs working at the moment.),” polynya wrote.
From that premise, the conclusion was blunt: “Given the crippling limitation of attaining strict international consensus, Nasdaq will ceaselessly be 1000’s of occasions sooner and cheaper than any minimally decentralised L1 blockchain, wanting unique new physics that doesn’t but exist.”
Polynya added that if blockchains wish to method real-time markets, they have to lean on succinct cryptography relatively than uncooked TPS. “The one identified methodology to get wherever shut is through the use of ZK proofs as an alternative for real-time execution and deferring & dashing up strict international consensus by orders of magnitude (as you solely want to realize consensus on a succinct proof as an alternative 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 international 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 an alternative of constructing functions 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 all the time 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 relatively than block TPS or consensus latency.
“Nasdaq requires that each message is included, and that each 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 payment 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 may 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 prompt Solana’s design already drives the price of marginal drops towards irrelevance. “If the ground precedence payment is < unfold / Ok for a fairly small Ok, then together with further messages will not be going to enhance spreads. Solana already achieved this. The ground inclusion value is a fraction of a foundation level, which implies that further 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 one way or the other make a system sooner. It’s fully incorrect. They’ll decrease among the prices for replication, however they will’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 instantaneous. If sizeof(tx) < sizeof(state change) then it’s almost all the time sooner to obtain the tx and execute it domestically as a result of native reminiscence bandwidth and latency is healthier than community bandwidth and latency. It will take extra time to obtain the state end result from the transaction than downloading the transaction itself and utilizing native copy of the state to execute it and produce the end result.”
His backside line focused Ethereum’s price mannequin: “So the one place the place zk proofs truly 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 pace. “the purpose of solana as a substitute 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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