• For the second quarter of 2022, the daily transactions recorded on Solana were 40 times that of Ethereum.
• The total number of wallets on Solana also jumped from 400,000 wallets to nearly 1 million by the end of May.

During the second quarter of 2022, Layer-1 blockchain platform Solana outperformed its biggest competitor Ethereum in daily transactions. This happened despite the major drawbacks of network outages and other macro conditions in the market.

Throughout the second quarter between April and June, the Solana blockchain reported 40 million daily transactions. This was 40 times Ethereum’s 1 million daily transactions during the same period.

This explosive growth in Solana’s blockchain transactions came against the backdrop of strong funding in mid-2022. The Solana Foundation and Solana Ventures have also formed a $100-million fund to push further the growth of blockchain gaming, decentralized finance (DeFi) projects, and nonfungible tokens (NFTs).

In Nansen’s State of the Quarter Report, research analyst Mega Septiandara writes:

Whether it’s the establishment of the Korea grant and investment fund, or the numerous upcoming events that welcome new builders and users, the Solana ecosystem is thriving.

Non-vote vs vote transactions

In comparison to Ethereum, the significant increase in Solana’s daily transactions was basically for non-vote transactions. As per the on-chain data, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) such as Mango Markets and Serum as well as Solana-based decentralized oracle network Switchboard emerged as the top decentralized apps (dApps) that contributed to the spike in daily transactions.

On the other hand, while looking at the vote transactions, Solana registered a range of roughly 100 million to 200 million transactions per day. This happened along with the spike in the total number of wallets from around 400,000 wallets to nearly 1 million by the end of May.

Although Solana managed to overtake daily transactions, the developer activity on the network has been seriously lagging behind. Over the last four months, Solana has dropped multiple ranks in terms of developer activity taking place on the platform. At the same time, Ethereum remains strong at the second position after Cardano. The strong Ethereum developer activity was also due to the preparations for the Merge event that took place last week.

New developments on Solana

Solana is working with Cosmos to build its first Layer-2 scalability platform Nitro will work as a Solana Virtual Machine (SVM)-compatible blockchain. Nitro will build the Sealevel VM (SVM) which will serve as the core development standard for Solana. Via SVM compatibility, Nitro will allow developers to easily launch their decentralized applications (dApps) on its platform.

Also, the IoT blockchain network Helium is planning to transition to the Solana blockchain. Helium developers said that this move will help to “improve operational efficiency and scalability”. The Helium developers community also emphasized the need to fix several technical issues and improve the network’s capabilities.