<\/p>\n
This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <\/em>subscribe<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Solana tends to get touchy about scaling. Since day one, the network\u2019s pitch has been a layer-1 blockchain using novel technology to run faster and cheaper than other layer-1s on offer.\u00a0<\/p>\n So it\u2019s no surprise that when Base announced a new feature called FlashBlocks would bring its \u201ceffective block times\u201d down to 200 ms \u2014 or half the length it takes Solana to create new blocks \u2014 Solana followers were quick to point out the somewhat-faulty logic. FlashBlocks are sub-blocks that allow for early confirmation times, but Base\u2019s full block times will still be two seconds. Solana has a feature called shreds which operates similarly to FlashBlocks, but its full block times are 400 ms.\u00a0<\/p>\n The whole ordeal is a bit melodramatic, but it highlights something that often doesn\u2019t get across in blockchain scaling conversations, which is that most of this stuff is basically made up anyways<\/em>.<\/p>\n When Base\u2019s creator Jesse Pollak gets on X to say that Base is about to be \u201c2x faster than\u201d Solana, he reveals nothing about how he\u2019s measuring speed, or why that would matter for Base\u2019s developers and users. Likewise when Firedancer developers say the Solana client can process one million transactions per second<\/a> in a test environment \u2014 it\u2019s a nice sounding number that would almost certainly hit snags in the real world.\u00a0<\/p>\n Even if Firedancer could run that fast, it would be of little import: Solana is currently processing roughly 1,000 user TPS.\u00a0<\/p>\n On the Lightspeed podcast this week<\/a>, my co-host Mert Mumtaz got talking with NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin about scaling. Polosukhin and fellow NEAR developer Bowen Wang said the blockchain will soon bring its block times down to 400 ms, and its blockchain shards \u2014 part of a scaling technique known as \u201csharding\u201d \u2014 can handle 10,000-20,000 TPS each.\u00a0<\/p>\n So if NEAR is so scalable, Mumtaz asked, then why is no one talking about it?<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody now comes out and says they\u2019re 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\u2019t actually know how it\u2019s going to behave,\u201d Polosukhin said.<\/p>\n The more important question, in Polosukhin\u2019s view: \u201cWhat are the use cases that people are actually using blockchain for right now?\u201d<\/p>\n 200 ms block times sound nice. One million TPS sounds nice. But if blockchains want to be more than intellectually stimulating engineering problems with no underlying value, then use cases are the much more important conversation to be having.<\/p>\n Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:<\/strong><\/p>\n This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. Solana tends to get touchy about scaling. Since day one, the network\u2019s pitch has been a layer-1 blockchain using novel technology to run faster and cheaper than other layer-1s on offer.\u00a0 So it\u2019s no surprise that when Base announced a new feature […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":376943,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[230,225,221,227,226,228,229,60,223,224,222],"class_list":["post-376940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptocurrency","tag-brave","tag-coinbase","tag-crypto","tag-decentralised","tag-decentralized","tag-decentralized-exchange","tag-erc-20","tag-featured","tag-meme-coin","tag-robinhood","tag-solana"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376940"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376940\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":376945,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376940\/revisions\/376945"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/376943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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