You know when a company brags about revenue figures ignoring that operational costs eat up a chunk of that, drastically reducing the net income to embarrassing levels?
That's exactly the picture I have in my head each time a Solana enthusiast brags about Solana TPS growth, claiming that everything else is shit in comparison.
It's like, the numbers are there, but they don't really make for a good argument for value because shit is bots infested and frankly net negative to the overall economy of the chain.
I've looked at data on the Solana blockchain a couple of times and it's mostly dex volumes I'm looking at and never direct onchain activities, so recently when I came across a tweet saying that 90% of onchain actions occurred on Solana, it was a bold statement that I had to fact check.
My first reaction when I looked at the data for myself was sincerely being impressed, but further down the line on looking deeper, it became simply embarrassing.
To put things into perspective, the level of activities recorded on the Solana blockchain should normally make the chain the most valuable by market capitalization, but it's not even able to beat Ethereum that's frankly been stuck being a stablecoin on YoY basis as a result of increasing number of Layer 2 solutions being funded by greedy VCs.
Solana’s TPS Growth
According to data from Defillama.com and Solscan.io, Solana sees as much as 60 million — 100 million+ transactions each day. This number is significantly higher if you include governance txs which were previously always marketed as "real user generated txs" until the scam was exposed.
Bottom line is, most data sources tracking Solana right now will indicate the difference between total txs and real user generated txs and what is considered real reaches as much as 2 billion in a month, at least in recent times.
Numbers like this makes every other blockchains out there look like a joke, because what do you mean you're casually facilitating over 2 billion transactions monthly?
This is the sort of numbers that would get investment firms throwing loads of cash at you in a bid to buy out your business. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, these figures should generally put Solana above Bitcoin in market capitalization.
What Bitcoin facilitates in a monthly is less than what Solana is supposedly processing daily, so being worth 30x more of current value isn't exactly an insane assessment considering the scale of this adoption, yeah? No?
Well, that brings us to the problem.
Over the last 30 days, 95% of Solana's total fees (base + priority) come from 1.26% of its wallet addresses (!)
Curious who's number 1? Wintermute. The rest are bots.
When you include Jito tips, which Solana supporters suggests accounts for 65% of Solana fees revenue, the figures barely move up and it's reported to be around 1.31%.
It's quite disappointing because this data is actually focused on active addresses, with is around 3.8 - 4 million, proving that, essentially, a highly concentrated few addresses generate most of the over 2 billion monthly transactions because how else do you explain 95% of fees being paid by 1.31% of active wallets?
Wintermute is a name I've recently talked about in relation to market manipulation. As a market maker that happens to be heavily involved with Solana, this is not surprising at all.
Evidently, Solana does not have a valuable user adoption. It's mostly rich few running scams and degenerate couple thousand retail(small fishes) gambling their savings in hopes of making millions.
It's growing TPS is generated by few addresses using automated bot software and most of its value flow is driven by fraud activities on the chain.
It's a shit reality.