Solana has come a long way, and in 2025, it’s still one of the fastest and most scalable blockchains out there. Despite the ups and downs in the crypto market, Solana’s technical foundation has stayed strong. In this post, let’s take a look at where Solana stands now from a technical perspective and what the latest updates mean for the network.

How Solana is Performing in 2025

The biggest strength of Solana has always been its speed. Even in 2025, Solana consistently handles 60,000–65,000+ TPS (transactions per second), with block finality staying well below 500 milliseconds. This kind of performance keeps it ahead of many other Layer 1 blockchains.

Behind the scenes, Solana keeps improving. Recent updates have fixed some issues with RPC notifications (which help apps communicate with nodes), and enhanced how Solana runs smart contracts by improving the SBPF (Solana Berkeley Packet Filter) engine. These small but important fixes keep the network stable and fast.

Developer Growth and Ecosystem Expansion

On the development side, Solana is still attracting a lot of builders. Tools like Anchor, Solana Pay, and better SDKs are making it easier to launch dApps, NFTs, and DeFi protocols.

Key areas of innovation in 2025 include:

• Better state compression to reduce the size of on-chain data.

• Experimental zero-knowledge proof integrations.

• Improvements to the Sealevel parallel runtime, making smart contracts run even faster.

Despite competition from other chains, Solana is still one of the top places for developers to experiment with new blockchain applications.

Latest Release & Infrastructure Changes

Solana’s latest stable release fixed some long-standing issues, making the network more reliable.

One thing to note—Ubuntu 20.04 is no longer supported as of May 2025.
Solana’s new binaries are built on Ubuntu 22.04, so if you're running validator or RPC nodes, you'll need to upgrade your OS.

Recent technical fixes include:

• RPC notification improvements (backport of #6645).

• SIMD updates for SBPF smart contract execution (backport of #6784).

From our side, we’ve already updated our nodes to run the latest stable release to keep supporting the Solana Mainnet Beta efficiently.

What’s Next for Solana?

Looking ahead to the second half of 2025, Solana’s technical outlook is positive:

• Validator decentralization continues to improve.

• A better fee market is helping prevent congestion during spikes in activity.

• Light clients and cross-chain integrations are being developed.

Solana is still pushing boundaries when it comes to scalability, and if the developer activity stays strong, we expect more innovative use cases to emerge by year-end.

Supporting the Solana Network

NOWNodes run and maintain RPC nodes to help keep the network stable and performant. If you’re building on Solana and need reliable infrastructure, feel free to reach out or just follow our updates—we’ll keep sharing technical insights like this.