Published: August 20th, 2025
The Solana blockchain briefly achieved a throughput spike of 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) in a live test conducted last Sunday (August 17th). Data compiled by the network's explorer shows the new benchmark is more than 25 times Solana's normal throughput.
Solana already beats legacy blockchains Bitcoin and Ethereum handily on TPS metrics, but the Sunday burst also surpassed one of TradFi's gold standard benchmarks: the Visa network's 65,000 transactions per second high water mark.
If that level of throughput could be sustained, Solana could become the core DeFi infrastructure for on-chain crypto trading.
The Solana validator behind the experiment said it demonstrates what's achievable if Solana's overseers continue to progress the layer-1 network's roadmap and efficiency improvements.
Pseudonymous validator Dr. Cavey PHD posted to his X account: “The rest of the network had little difficulty with these blocks, and the next-in-line validator generated their blocks normally. This is a major milestone both for the validator ecosystem and decentralized systems generally.”
Cavey's validator reached a peak TPS of 104,520 on Sunday after deciding to run the experiment ‘on a whim.’
It's worth noting that the blocks used in the test were filled with computation-lite transactions like votes and no-op transactions, and not transactions like token swaps or meme coin launches that would fill a typical Solana block.
Still, Cavey said that with more efficient programs and token standards, the L1 could handle roughly 100,000 token transfers per second, between 10,000 and 20,000 swaps per second, even in its current form.
Crypto game Off the Grid's GUN token expanded to Solana in July after being exclusively launched on Avalanche, the blockchain that powers the shooter's dedicated L1 network, GUNZ. The game's ecosystem expansion also brings a new skin pack for Solana.
In a post on the Gunzilla Games official X account, the game's publisher said the shift from proprietary to public chain is designed to make it easier for crypto-gaming newcomers to buy and trade the GUN token. It also signals what the company calls a new ‘multi-chain ethos,’ suggesting that further expansion to non-Avalanche chains is in the offing.
After the X post, data from CoinGecko showed that GUN had extended a loss trend, falling over 10 per cent on the day to hit USD 0.037.
In a roundtable discussion on X Spaces hosted by Gunzilla Games, Gerry Lee of Solana's gaming development group said Solana wants to be ‘the best place to launch a gaming token.’
‘Blockchain gaming projects should see us as the best place to connect with users and access a market that can find the accurate market price for my token.’
Data from CoinGeck shows GUN is currently the 74th-largest gaming token by market cap. Meanwhile, sales on Off the Grid's gaming marketplace keep growing. Figures from DegenRadar show it has processed USD 666,700 in transactions over the past month.
Further evidence that the game is building a growing crypto-economy, the size of its in-game skin sales is also on the rise, with one hard-to-find skin recently selling for $USD 5,399.
In May, Off the Grid started moving players onto the mainnet of its proprietary GUNZ blockchain, where they could trade GUN tokens for in-game NFT items.
Despite only a fraction of the user base being able to make trades, transaction volume quickly heated up, with some items selling for thousands of dollars' worth of crypto.
The sudden sales uptick came as the popular Web3 multiplayer prepared to expand onto the Steam PC platform, which had previously banned blockchain games back in 2021.
Fans noted that Steam's listing for Off the Grid said it would feature an in-game marketplace, potentially a reference to crypto functionality.
At the time, there were 16.4 million active crypto wallets on GUNZ, a new Avalanche L1 network designed to host Off the Grid and other games from developer Gunzilla Games. Meanwhile, just 21,000 players had been moved onto the fully-functional mainnet, roughly 0.13 percent of the player base.
Even with that fractional liquidity, some sizable trades were taking place. A tactical vest sold for USD 2,390 while a gas mask traded hands for around USD 1,100. ‘Convict’ chest rigs had been selling for more than $500.
That same month, crypto markets saw three billion dollars-worth in token unlocks across seven new crypto projects. Data from analytics firm TokenUnlocks showed the two biggest came from the Pyth DeFi oracle network and the Aevo crypto derivatives platform.
New crypto projects typically release their full supply of tokens incrementally over weeks, months or years. Bitcoin, for example, has released 19.7 million into circulation from a total supply of 21 million. The ‘tokenomics timeline’ is usually documented in a white paper accompanying the project's launch.
May 2024 also saw the much-watched DeFi oracle network Pyth activate its first unlock, just six months after its original go-to-market date. On 20th May 2024, 2.13 billion in PYTH tokens arrived in the market, making the value of the unlock around USD 1.24 billion.
Fifty per cent of the tokens fund ecosystem growth, 25 percent went towards publisher rewards, while the remaining quarter were auctioned off through private sales to support protocol development.
TokenUnlocks called the Pyth plan a cliff unlock, meaning a mass of tokens were released all at once rather than incrementally across days. Pyth plans another 2.13 billion unlock in June 2025.
Aevo took a different route for its unlock, combining both a cliff unlock and a linear unlock, where a specific number of tokens are released daily.
Some 827.6 million AEVO tokens worth ca. USD 1.24 billion were unlocked on 15th May 2024. Another 6.13 million worth USD 9.20 million were then released each day for the following nine days.
