Today’s dispatch starts with a statistic most people won’t know or care about. But it’s a number that will mean something to your life soon enough.
That statistic: 1 million transactions per second.
That’s the speed at which the Solana blockchain will be operating in the next couple of years. At that speed, Solana will be faster than all other cryptocurrency blockchains… combined.
And why do I care, Jeff? I don’t nerd out over crypto stuff.
Ahh, dear reader. A fine and legitimate point.
Few people care.
Few people also care about the processors and graphics cards inside their electronic gadgets and doo-hickeys. But the moment a TV or laptop lags in the middle of The Lincoln Lawyer, they’re suddenly miffed at technology.
I mean, think how technological speed has changed our world in the last 30 years. A lot of us—not you Millennials and Zs—grew up in the early internet age. We remember, painfully, our dial-up modems and computer processing power that could run one program at a time.
And now, here I sit on a riverboat in Amsterdam, cruising to a crypto conference, beginning to thumb out this dispatch on my phone—a personal computer that fits into my pocket and which is deftly running multiple programs at the same moment, while connected to the entire world wirelessly.
All made possible by processor speeds that are exponentially faster.
I don’t think about the technology inside this device—you probably don’t either. Few of us do. I can’t tell you which processor is powering my actions. No clue what graphics card allows me to see the words I’m typing on the (cracked) screen.
All I know—all I care about—is that this iPhone handles my tasks quickly and with no lag.
Which is exactly why 1 million transactions per second is more than a little “whiz-bang.”
Our world is rapidly evolving technologically. Where today’s internet was a giant leap for man, the newly emerging internet—what we know as Web3–is a ginormous leap for mankind.
So much of our world is about 19 seconds away from running entirely on the blockchain. Banks are moving investment services onto the blockchain. Music and ticketing services are moving onto the blockchain. BNP Paribas. JPMorgan. Goldman Sachs. Fidelity… so many financial firms are ramping up blockchain activity you’d think physical cash is already dead. Visa and Mastercard are moving onto the blockchain because of the security upgrade and the enhanced speed.
Speed.
That’s why 1 million transactions per second is so relevant.
In the blockchain-based internet world in which we’re about to start living, transaction speed is paramount. Consumers and businesses will demand that transactions happen and clear instantaneously. Ain’t nobody gonna hang out at a 7-Eleven for 10 minutes waiting for their purchase of a Slurpee to register on the blockchain.
They want it to clear as fast—if not faster—than it does now with a debit card or cash.
With most blockchains, that’s not really feasible at the moment.
Ethereum, which much of the world assumes will become the “transactional” layer of the blockchain on which all kinds of financial services will operate, runs at just 15 to 17 transactions per second. Slower than a three-legged turtle trying to cross flypaper.
In theory, Ethereum is aiming for a transactional speed of 100,000, but I am not convinced the #2 blockchain will see that rate anytime soon… if ever.
Yet Solana, which already regularly logs speeds of 5,000 to 6,000 transaction per second, will soon be 10x that speed. 100x that speed.
I won’t venture too far into the weeds here. I will only say that a technology known as Firedancer has already been deployed onto Solana’s test network, and it’s running at 10x to 100x current speeds, or up to 600,000 transactions per second.
The relevance here is that Solana is very likely to emerge as what Ethereum always hoped to be: the world’s transactional blockchain, the network across which everything flows—from moving money around the world in milliseconds, to holding your phone up to a blockchain-based vending machine to grab a Red Bull (which I just at Solana’s Breakpoint conference in Amsterdam earlier this month.)
Again, you don’t necessarily have to care about any of this (unless you’re an investor wondering what crypto to own other than bitcoin).
But those who don’t know the Solana name will come to recognize it over time, just as the world came to know “Intel Inside,” even though 99% of global computer users don’t care what processor runs their tech.
We are on the cusp of a technological revolution as significant as the Industrial Revolution. The world is changing at the speed of blockchain.
That speed is 1 million transactions per second.
You might never see it in action or even think about it.
But there’s a good chance it’s going to be a statistic that powers much of your daily life very, very soon.