Solana is often apprehensive about scaling. From the very beginning, it was emphasized that this network would be a layer-1 Blockchain using innovative technology in order to operate faster and more cheaply than existing layer-1 Blockchains.
Base’s announcement of a feature called FlashBlocks was not surprising. “effective block times” down to 200 ms — or half the length it takes Solana to create new blocks — Solana followers were quick to point out the somewhat-faulty logic. FlashBlocks allow early confirmation, while Base’s block time will remain two seconds. Solana offers a similar feature, shreds. However, its block time is 400ms.
It’s a little melodramatic. But it shows something which we often don’t realize when talking about blockchain scaling: that much of what is said is fabricated.
Base creator Jesse Pollak will announce on X that Base is going to be released. “2x faster than” Solana doesn’t reveal how he measures speed or why it would be important for Base developers and users. Likewise when Firedancer developers say the Solana client can process one million transactions per second in a test environment — it’s a nice sounding number that would almost certainly hit snags in the real world.
Solana processes roughly 1,000 TPS per user.
Mert Mumtaz and Illia Polisukhin discussed scaling on the Lightspeed Podcast this week. Polosukhin and fellow NEAR developer Bowen Wang said the blockchain will soon bring its block times down to 400 ms, and its blockchain shards — part of a scaling technique known as “sharding” — can handle 10,000-20,000 TPS each.
Mumtaz asked: If NEAR was so scaleable, why does no one talk about it?
“Everybody now comes out and says they’re scaling, [and] everybody throws a number out from a marketing perspective, [and] as Solana saw, until you actually put real pressure on the system, you don’t actually know how it’s going to behave,” Polosukhin said.
According to Polosukhin, the more pressing question is: “What are the use cases that people are actually using blockchain for right now?”
200 ms block times sound nice. It’s nice to hear about one million TPS. If blockchains are to become more than just a set of intellectually stimulating problems without any underlying value then the use cases will be much more valuable.
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