*https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-amm-test-a-no-bs-look-at-l1-performance-4c8c2129d581*
GM & Haseeb Qureshi, March 2022
Multichain is now a reality. Ethereum’s lack of scalability has caused a mass migration to a new generation of L1s. Most of these L1s use the EVM (the Ethereum Virtual Machine), which makes them compatible with Ethereum wallets and developer tools. But Solana has completely rebuilt its stack from the ground up. Solana claims to be the fastest blockchain in existence. So it begs the question: Just how much faster is Solana than the EVM chains?
TVL growth of L1 blockchains, Credit: The Block
First, we need to agree on how we measure performance. Since times immemorial, new blockchains have thrown around claims about how much more performant they are than Ethereum. It’s an old pastime. You’ll see lots of numbers bandied about and hastily assembled charts, comparing self-reported TPS (transactions per second). Unfortunately, these TPS numbers usually come from their own marketing materials, which are almost always BS.
Most benchmarks released by L1s themselves measure TPS of simple value transfers — i.e., transferring coins from one account to another. Simple transfers are extremely cheap and thus produce big numbers, and everyone loves big numbers. But no blockchain is actually bottlenecked on transfers like this, and this kind of activity doesn’t reflect real-world usage patterns. Furthermore, many of these numbers are generated on devnets or testnets rather than on mainnet. We don’t care about what someone’s software can do in the abstract: we care about what is possible on current mainnets.
In reality, there’s no single agreed-upon way to benchmark TPS. That’s often the case in benchmarking; it’s a messy and fraught field, full of misleading marketing, overfitting / “teaching to the test,” and cheating.
That’s a tricky question, because performance has multiple dimensions.
First, performance is always a tradeoff against decentralization. Testnets and devnets, which are highly centralized, can produce incredible numbers compared to what’s possible in mainnet environments. And many mainnets cut corners on decentralization, which squeezes out additional performance.
But let’s say we want to ignore decentralization and purely focus on performance. Well, benchmarking blockchain performance is notoriously hard because most new chains have very poor data visibility.
7 years in, Ethereum performance is highly studied and very well-understood. But as you start exploring newer chains, most of them have much less tooling, poor observability, and are constantly evolving. By the time you read this, these benchmarks will probably be out of date.
Furthermore, benchmarking is always arbitrary and riddled with pitfalls. The best you can do is pick a benchmark that measures something valuable, and then qualify your results as carefully as you can. That’s what we’ll be attempting to do here.
But what do we even mean by performance? There are two aspects to performance: throughput and latency.
