NEAR protocol seeks to achieve a performance of up to 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) ¹. This goal exceeds Solana’s target of 50,000 TPS ². However, claims on a blockchain’s TPS have to be taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes blockchain teams will boast about their chain's high TPS capability without explaining if the metric was met in the lab or in the real-world.

In this dashboard, I measure NEAR’s real-world achieved transactions per second. I also measure the daily failure rate of transactions on the chain. Finally, I compare these findings with the real-world performance of Solana.

Methodology

The daily average transactions per second is measured by adding all distinct transactions in a day, and dividing it by the number of seconds in a day (86 400).

The daily transaction failure rate is the daily ratio of failed transactions by the total transactions per day.

Due to computational constraints, only the last seven days of Solana data are used. NEAR data stretches back to January 1, 2022.

Result

In the real world, both blockchains are still far from having enabled 100,000, let alone 50,000 TPS. These levels of performance have yet to be battle tested. So far, users are not issuing such large volumes of transactions on either blockchain.

Solana has much higher utilisation than NEAR. It is the more popular blockchain and thus facilitates more transactions. While Solana enables over 500 TPS, NEAR only sees 3 or 4 TPS, with a peak of 20 on January 16, 2022.

Observations

It is good to know that NEAR and Solana’s theoretical performance is higher than what the current demand requires. However, when Solana encounters high transaction volumes, it experiences occasional performance issues. This makes me question whether the chain can achieve its goal of 50,000 TPS.

In the case of NEAR, the blockchain sees lower volumes of transactions. It is hard to judge the performance of NEAR with such low transaction counts.

In any case, while Solana sees more transactions per second than NEAR, we cannot conclude that it performs better than NEAR. NEAR might have a higher TPS potential.

Finally, the transaction failure rate of both chains are comparable.

These findings highlight the importance of having third party analysts measure the real world performance of blockchains. Users should compare and contrast the performance claims of blockchain teams with what was achieve in the real world.

Sources:

1:

2:

The daily transaction failure rate of NEAR is approximately 10 to 25%. An impressive peak of 55% of daily transactions failed on May 12.

In the last seven days, the daily transaction failure rate on Solana was between 20 to 27%.

Blockchains with very low transaction fees often see higher transaction failure rates. Because the cost of a failed transaction is only a few cents, users tend to be less careful ensure their transactions are successful.