Since the first Genesis block was created on Solana MainNet on the 16th March 2020 there has been over 100 billion transactions completed! We have been following the journey of Solana at our Blog and it has been one hell of a ride. Thanks to all the Solana devs and Projects building over the last couple of years on Solana we have seen huge increased in total TX, TPS, security and reliability. So how can we see what all this 100 billion transactions and 4000 TPS fuss is about? Let’s check out some of the Solana tools that we can use…
Solana Buildooors Now on YouTube!
We will be backing up our blog posts with videos from now on. It’s time to bring Web3 Buildooors and the next wave of opportunities to the world!
Official Solana Explorer Tool
At the Official Solana Explorer, you can view basic Transactions Per Second (TPS) results along with latency of the Solana Network. This is a good tool to quickly see if transactions are performing normally. However it lacks any ability to deep dive into the stats to see what’s really going on in the Solana Network.
Solana Beach Dashboard
The Solana Beach dashboard, which was created by Staking Facilities a Solana validator, does a great job showing the important information of the performance of the Solana Network by including stats on Slot Height, Epoch, Validator metrics such as super-minority and current validator software version (more on validator stats in another post). It also has a cool looking global map of all Solana Validators around the world. The TPS is broken out to show vote and non-vote transactions which roughly equates to 70% being system overhead voting transactions and 30% actual Solana application usage. Unfortunately, this dashboard again doesn’t break out who all these transactions are created by, so let’s have a look at the following 3 tools!
Quick Throwback to 2.5 Years Ago!
At this blog, we did the exact same thing 2.5 years ago! We visited the Solana Beach dashboard and pulled this screenshot! It is important to take a step back and see how far the Solana Blockchain and Ecosystem have come. Congrats all !
1. Solscan Solana Analytics Dashboard
The Solscan Dashboard does a great job showing all your key Solana Network performance stats like epoch, TX count, TPS & validators but it also does a great job of displaying NFT volume and Defi DEX & protocol usage as they have specific sub-dashboards for both of those too! Furthermore, if you actually want to deep dive into what these 100B TX and 4K TPS is, you can. Introducing the Solscan Solana Analytics Dashboard…
The analytics dashboard dives into Vote & Non-vote transactions also. A key point to mention here, is that Solscan could improve their dashboard by including a tick box to show/hide the previous 24 hours of data. This would avoid the drop-off to zero for stats for the current day that haven’t been collected and displayed yet. (this functionality is on other dashboards, will hit them up about it)
You can also see the latest minted SPL tokens and NFT’s for the previous week. Great to see progress of new token launches and NFT collections.
Most importantly, the Solscan Solana Analytics Dashboard does a fantastic job breaking out Solana Programs and Instructions to really show what actual applications are generating the most usage. Solscan do a great job of showing tooltips, just hit the information icon to get a hint of what’s actually going on.
The Solana Runtime requires both instructions and transactions to specify a list of all accounts (including program accounts) they intended to read from or write to. Each instruction points to the program account it’s intended to target. Therefore, transactions can interact with programs via instructions. The pie chart indicates the volume of instructions handled for each program.
Solscan Solana Analytics Dashboard Tooltip
Understanding where exactly the 4000 transactions per second are coming from is not easy and I hope the tooling get better over time and provides more transparency. We have come a long way in the last couple of years so we can only get better from here!
To learn more about how Solana handles accounts, programs, instructions and transactions check out the blog post by Lab Eleven’s Sohrab who does a great job to explain how it works. Check it out here > Anatomy of Solana Program Invocations using Anchor.
2. Chaincrunch Solana Dashboard
The second tool that does a decent job of representing transaction transparency is Chaincrunch’s Solana Dashboard. Here they show vote and non-vote tx’s too, but also show ones that have failed or had an error.
However, it is when you click on the tabbed dashboard called “Program Activities” that you can see some real deep dive data. In this dashboard you can actually specific the Program Account, which in the default example when visiting this page is the addresses from Metaplex’s Candy Machine contract. Here you can see a daily total of Candy Machine instructions, unique fee payers, unique program signers and program TX counts. Feel free to change the filter at the top right so you can see whatever contract address you want and the Chaincrunch dashboard will update to show you the stats.
3. Nansen Solana Dashboard
The third & final tool to check out is the Nansen Solana Dashboard. It is an impressive multi-chain comparison dashboard that shows a ton of information about the Solana network, but also other blockchains if you are interested in doing like-for-like comparisons. Here you can see Daily Active Accounts & TX’s along with the ability to see accounts & transactions by Entity. This is great for actually diving into the vanity metric ‘TPS’ and seeing who is making these transactions on-chain. At time of writing there were 3 pages of entities listed. Obviously there may be hundreds or thousands or projects running on Solana at any one time, so this isn’t an exhaustive list, but represents the top ~25 projects and their respective on-chain activities.
Here you can see a breakdown by Solana project, like Serum, Marinade Finance, Mango Markets, Raydium & others. Check out the full Solana Ecosystem here to see the long tail of how huge the ecosystem is!
A Final Note on TPS, Cheap Fees & Solana Network Stability
If you are building a project on Solana, it is amazing to get transaction cost down to a fraction of a penny and to get TX speed to happen blazingly fast. But buildooors need network stability and when a project needs to conduct activities on-chain, the network needs to be reliable enough to respond. Over the past 4 months Solana has seen amazing stability due to the gargantuan fixes that have been put in place. You can see all the Upgrade work that Solana devs have been doing including QUIC, Stake-weighted QoS & Fee Markets here! To see the latest incidents and the inverse, the network stability over time check out the Solana Status page here!
So What Analytics Tools do you use to see Solana TPS Breakdown?
Let us know on YT or Twitter. Cheers!
