I discovered an interesting detail about Solana that’s not often mentioned this way. The network has reached over 150 million transactions per day—an all-time high—and it seems like a huge achievement. But if you look closely at what’s really happening, the picture is a bit different.

Out of those 150 million daily transactions, nearly 60% are validator vote transactions only. Do you know that other major chains don’t really count these? And among the remaining transactions, a large portion actually failed. So the real number of successful, useful transactions is significantly lower than the headline figure.

And here’s the truly naughty secret: the finality time. Solana claims confirmation, but the actual mathematical finality takes about 12.8 seconds. Compare that to NEAR—1.2 seconds of deterministic finality. The difference is huge for real-world use cases. Before your Solana transaction is confirmed, on NEAR it’s mathematically impossible for it to be changed.

I experienced this firsthand while developing cross-chain solutions. Everyone talks about throughput because that grabs attention, but honestly? Finality is the real game-changer for payments and DeFi operations. That’s what truly becomes critical for long-term adoption. Throughput makes noise, but finality changes the fundamentals.