Solana briefly recorded more than 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) on its mainnet over the weekend, block data shows.
A block processed 43,016 successful transactions and 50 failed ones for a peak of 107,540 TPS, facilitated and processed by validator “Cavey Cool.”
The spike was driven by no-operation, or “noop,” program calls, or lightweight instructions required in every transaction that don’t change state but can be used to stress-test network capacity.
Critics argue that such loads are artificial. But Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz said in an X post that the cost to the network wasn’t trivial: While execution compute units (CUs) are low, the “total cost” also accounts for signature verification, data loading and other non-execution overhead.
That makes them comparable to a low-cost oracle update, rather than meaningless spam.
As such, actual user-facing throughput is far lower as of Monday morning. On-chain tracker Solscan shows an average of 3,500 TPS, nearly two-thirds of which are validator vote transactions.
Chainspect and Solscan peg effective throughput for payments and applications at roughly 1,000 TPS.
Still, the data showed that Solana could theoretically sustain 80,000–100,000 TPS in real operations like transfers or oracle updates under peak conditions — improving the appeal of the network’s SOL (SOL) token.
