Solana is the most performant permissionless blockchain in the world. On current iterations of the Solana Testnet, a network of 200 physically distinct nodes supports a sustained throughput of more than 50,000 transactions per second when running with GPUs. Achieving this requires the implementation of several optimizations and new technologies, and the result is a breakthrough in network capacity that signals a new phase in blockchain development.

There are 8 key innovations that make the Solana network possible:

In this post, we’ll explore Turbine, Solana’s block propagation protocol — inspired by BitTorrent — that solves the blockchain scalability trilemma.

The Scalability Trilemma

The scalability trilemma in blockchain technology is all about bandwidth. In most blockchain networks today, given a fixed amount of bandwidth per node, increasing the node count will increase the amount of time necessary to propagate all the data to all nodes. That’s a big problem.

However, there are myriad opportunities to optimize how data is propagated. There are many novel data propagation techniques, each of which is optimized for specific applications. For example, BitTorrent is optimized for serving large files to large groups of people using TCP, while MediaFLO, a project with which I worked, is a protocol optimized for data propagation at the physical layer to improve the efficiency of multicast over wireless networks.

With that context, let’s jump into Turbine, Solana’s block propagation protocol, to explain how the Solana network propagates data to solve the blockchain scalability trilemma.

Turbine