Via fortune.com
Solana processes record 1.2B non-vote transactions in a single week
A 66% compute limit upgrade and fresh ETF inflows are pushing Solana's real-world usage to levels the network has never seen before.
Solana just posted its busiest week on record. The network processed 1.2 billion non-vote transactions in the seven days ending August 10, 2026, the first time it has ever crossed the one-billion mark in a single week.
That number matters because of what it excludes. Non-vote transactions strip out the routine consensus messages that validators exchange to agree on the state of the chain. What’s left is actual user activity: token swaps, DeFi protocol interactions, NFT trades, and every other thing a real person or application asks the network to do.
A week of back-to-back records
The weekly total was itself a product of two daily records set within six days of each other. On August 4, Solana processed 169.9 million non-vote transactions, which stood as the all-time daily high for about a week. Then August 10 arrived and pushed that to 171.9 million, a rate of roughly 1,990 transactions per second sustained across the entire day.
The engine behind the jump is a technical upgrade that increased the maximum compute limit per block by 66%. Compute units on Solana are roughly analogous to gas on Ethereum: they measure how much computational work a block can contain. Raising that ceiling by two-thirds means more instructions can be packed into each block without stretching out block times, which allows transaction throughput to climb without degrading the user experience on the other end.
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Institutional money is paying attention too
The same day Solana set its daily transaction record, US spot Solana ETFs pulled in $8.8 million in net inflows. Every dollar of that went to the Bitwise BSOL fund, according to data from August 10.
For developers building on Solana, the compute limit increase has a direct practical consequence: applications that previously had to split complex operations across multiple transactions may now be able to consolidate them into fewer steps. That matters for user experience in DeFi protocols, where multi-step interactions are a persistent friction point.