Solana Client Agave Shatters 1.1 Million TPS Barrier, Equaling Firedancer’s Historic Benchmark

Solana's scaling revolution just hit ludicrous speed.

Agave—the network's newest client—just smashed through the 1.1 million transactions per second ceiling. That puts it neck-and-neck with Firedancer's much-hyped performance numbers. No theory, no vaporware—just raw, on-chain throughput.

How It Actually Works

Parallel processing meets optimized state management. Agave doesn’t ask validators to work harder—just smarter. It cuts latency, bypasses legacy bottlenecks, and handles concurrent requests like it’s no big deal. The result? A network that feels less like blockchain and more like high-frequency trading infrastructure.

Why This Isn’t Just Another ‘High TPS’ Claim

Because real usage demands real numbers. Solana’s been hammered for congestion and downtime before. Agave isn’t a speculative upgrade—it’s live, it’s measurable, and it matches the performance of Jump Crypto’s Firedancer, which until now was the gold standard in hypothetical scalability.

So What’s the Catch?

Adoption. Throughput means nothing if validators don’t shift. But with numbers like these? Node operators won’t just upgrade—they’ll sprint. Meanwhile, Ethereum maxis are still trying to explain why “decentralization” excuses 15 TPS. Cue the institutional money—always late, but never absent. They’ll pour in once the suits realize Solana isn’t just for degens anymore. It’s for everyone who likes speed—and profits.

Solana’s Core Client Smashes 1.1M TPS

The milestone immediately fed a broader narrative about client-level competition on Solana. Helius co-founder Mert Mumtaz framed it this way: “last year Firedancer hit 1.1M TPS on a synthetic test — now, Agave has done the same. There is an outdated notion that Solana will become faster only if Firedancer. This is from a time when Agave wasn’t as competitive — but it is now. The competition between the two client teams will improve the chain like never before.”

Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana’s co-founder, poked fun at the victory lap, quipping: “Pls no more. Just ship ag and lower the timers to 150ms.” The remark tracks with the network’s ongoing push to reduce consensus latencies. That push is currently crystallized in SIMD-0326 (“Alpenglow”), a consensus overhaul now in community voting that targets ~150 ms block finality by reworking how and where validator votes occur.

Under the hood, the Agave test hints at where performance headroom is being unlocked. “Scheduler-bindings” — a forthcoming extension that lets validators plug in custom block-packing logic without forking Core — has been on Anza’s public roadmap since May. Recent Agave 2.3 literature also details a revamped TPU client (“tpu-client-next”), AccountsDB I/O reductions, a greedy scheduler, and snapshot/gossip improvements, all of which cut real-world overhead even if they don’t show up in synthetic peaks one-for-one.

The obvious question is what the 1.1M TPS burst actually means for users. Synthetic single-node tests measure raw execution and scheduling throughput with some guardrails temporarily lifted; they do not translate linearly to mainnet capacity, which is bounded by network propagation, signature verification, scheduler policy, and economic constraints. Still, the number is directionally consistent with the network’s trajectory. Earlier this month, independent experiments observed six-figure TPS bursts on mainnet under heavy program-call load — a separate datapoint that, taken together with Agave’s lab figure, reinforces the pace of optimization across both client and protocol layers.

Two broader takeaways stand out. First, Solana’s client diversity is no longer hypothetical: Agave (Anza) and Firedancer (Jump Crypto) are now trading blows on the same synthetic leaderboard, with different codebases stressing different parts of the system — a healthy sign for resilience and future performance. Second, the product focus has shifted from trophy numbers to latency and predictability: the 150 ms target, if adopted, compresses user-perceived finality in ways that matter for payments, trading, and real-time apps even when headline TPS fluctuates.

At press time, SOL traded at $207.86.