By examining the processing speeds of the largest blockchain networks in terms of total value locked in DeFiLlama, CoinGecko has outlined which are the fastest based on the Transactions per Actual Speed (TPS) metric.
The report concludes that Solana will lead the way, followed by Sui and Binance Smart Chain. Interestingly, Ethereum and Bitcoin are not even in the top 15.
Solana's world
Despite several outages over the past few years, the Solana blockchain has emerged as the fastest on CoinGecko's list. His average daily TPS is 1,053.7, but the network said he hit just over 1,500 on April 6th.
According to the report, this makes Solana “46x faster than Ethereum and more than 5x faster than Polygon, which has the highest TPS of any Ethereum scaling solution.”
Still, CoinGecko said Solana's average TPS is still far from the theoretical maximum speed of 65,000 TPS claimed by the developer.
Perhaps due to its speed and relatively low transaction fees, Solana became home to a number of meme coins that emerged during this cycle, including WIF, BONK, BOME, POPCAT, and MEW.
CoinGecko’s top three list is rounded out by two other non-EVM networks, Sui and BSC. According to the paper, non-EVM blockchains are on average four times faster than their EVM counterparts.
Polygon is 8x faster than Ethereum
Although Ethereum transitioned from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake at the end of 2022, it still fails to crack the top 15 on CoinGecko's list. They rank 17th with an average TPS of 22.7. In contrast, Polygon, the largest layer 2 network on Ethereum, recorded his 190 TPS.
“Polygon is therefore currently the fastest of the largest Ethereum scaling solutions, 8.4 times faster than Ethereum itself, even though it lags even further behind the top three fastest blockchains.”
Bitcoin is one of the few networks that still uses proof of work, but it is not expected to be among the top networks. According to CoinGecko, the world's largest blockchain has an average TPS of 10.73, ranking it 20th. But interestingly, Blast, Merlin, Mode, zkLink Nova, and Thorchain rank next to Bitcoin.
