Solana is generally considered a fast blockchain. However, speed alone isn't very meaningful. The question is rather: where does the speed matter?

First and foremost, speed is important in payments. If the blockchain processes payments efficiently in terms of both speed and cost, it can be used to send money. Multiple payments may occur simultaneously in certain cases. Solana's documentation states that stablecoin payments and transfers along with settlement are use cases for the network.

Moreover, speed matters in trading. Prices on the decentralized exchange change very fast and may require transaction finalization in a timely manner. According to Solana's documentation, its block times are about 400 milliseconds and it can support applications like DEXs, lending markets and other financial applications.

However, there is one more aspect of a fast network that often remains unnoticed.

Fast transaction processing time is not the only place where the fast network is beneficial.

Imagine an app where any user interaction results in blockchain transactions. If these interactions are not fast enough or not cost-efficient enough, using the application might be quite painful.

Another advantage provided by Solana is parallel execution through its Sealevel runtime which enables parallelization of program executions for programs that are not dependent on each other.

There is also the case of payments which provides an intriguing example of on-chain functionality. Solana currently documents the following payment options: stablecoin transfers, recurring payments, batch payments and the payment infrastructure itself. There are even ways for applications to sponsor transaction fees in order to make it possible to use Solana without having SOL.

Thus, the speed of Solana is not all about numbers that one can present on a chart.

It starts to matter if it makes something cheaper, faster or easier.

This is where the usefulness of blockchain performance becomes evident beyond crypto community discussions.