Solana vs Ethereum? Here’s the winner when comparing AMM speeds

ambcrypto.com:

It’s no secret that crypto users love to race and compare speeds, but an evaluation of this kind is actually much harder than it sounds. To that end, an investigation by GM and Haseeb Qureshi from Dragonfly Capital delved into the question of whether Solana could take on an Ethereum Virtual Machine [EVM] compatible chain in a speed race.

Quickly shooting down transaction-per-second rates, the two researchers instead decided to look at thespeed of Automated Market Makers [AMMs]. To refresh your memory, AMMs are what make it possible for decentralized exchanges to function on their own, and complete DeFi tasks.

Comparing Ethereum’s Uniswap V2, Celo’s Ubeswap, Avalanche’s Trader Joe, Polygon’s Quickswap, BSC’s PancakeSwap, and Solana’s Orca, the two researchers concluded that the winner was indeed Solana. However, note that the test took place on the Solana devnet, which is faster than the mainnet.

The final figures were 273.34 Orca trades per second, with 13 seconds to finality.

Source: GM on Medium.com

That said, there are some caveats. Removing Solana’s consensus messages from the transaction count, the report stated,

“Subtracting those, you’re left with ~600 TPS, of which most of those are Serum trades which are very cheap. So long as enough other contracts are being touched, Solana can also achieve higher performance in production.”

Meanwhile, Ethereum’s Uniswap V2 achieved 9.19 trades per second on average, and a maximum of 18.38 trades per second.

Readers might have strong reactions to the above figures, but Qureshi advised caution as there is a myriad of ways to measure speed amongst blockchains. What’s more, AMMs are ideally getting faster.