A weekend publish on X from the official Solana account ignited a recent spherical of cross-chain sniping after it juxtaposed the Ethereum community’s transaction velocity with Nasdaq’s commerce throughput. “After 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.
After 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 underneath 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 velocity 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 reaching strict international consensus, Nasdaq will eternally be 1000’s of instances quicker and cheaper than any minimally decentralised L1 blockchain, in need of unique new physics that doesn’t but exist.”
Polynya added that if blockchains wish to method real-time markets, they need to lean on succinct cryptography fairly than uncooked TPS. “The one identified technique to get wherever shut is through the use of ZK proofs as a substitute for real-time execution and deferring & rushing up strict international consensus by orders of magnitude (as you solely want to realize consensus on a succinct proof as a substitute of tens of millions of transactions), and even then, it’ll value orders of magnitude extra, will take years to mature, and it’s not an applicable 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 a substitute of constructing purposes that make folks’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—ought to be about consumption ensures and scheduling fairly 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 way in which that precedence charges work is that any txs with a precedence price 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’ll be able to 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 urged Solana’s design already drives the price of marginal drops towards irrelevance. “If the ground precedence price is
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 folks get this false impression that ZK proofs are quicker or can one way or the other make a system quicker. It’s utterly unsuitable. They’ll decrease a number of the prices for replication, however they’ll’t enhance efficiency if replication value isn’t a blocker.”
Yakovenko illustrated the purpose with a bandwidth-versus-execution thought experiment: “Let’s assume that zk proofs are utterly free and on the spot. If sizeof(tx)
His backside line focused Ethereum’s value mannequin: “So the one place the place zk proofs really assist is that if replication is dear. 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 related 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.
Featured picture created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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