Somnia claims sub‑second finality and 1M+ TPS potential, putting it theoretically above most production Layer 1s; in practice, public materials show hundreds of thousands of TPS sustained in testing and devnets, which is still far beyond typical live throughput reported by major chains like Solana or Aptos today.
Verification on mainnet at scale is the caveat, so treat lab peaks and stress tests differently from real‑world averages.
Headline numbers
Somnia’s docs target 1,000,000+ TPS with sub‑second finality for real‑time apps, backed by a MultiStream architecture decoupling data production from consensus ordering.
Independent writeups cite sustained 500k–800k TPS on public testnet and 1M+ TPS in devnet or lab settings, with sub‑second finality as the UX goal.
Aggregators listing “fastest blockchains” currently show Somnia topping real‑time TPS leaderboards, though these dashboards can be volatile and methodology dependent.
Solana comparison
Recent coverage highlights Solana stress‑test peaks above 100k TPS and roadmap targets toward 150 ms finality with Alpenglow and Firedancer, but common real‑world sustained throughput hovers far lower, often in the low thousands TPS.
Community and third‑party trackers still show meaningful finality times and note that practical averages diverge from peak marketing figures. This is normal for high‑performance chains under mixed, real traffic.
Aptos comparison
Aptos materials emphasize sub‑second user finality, with block times near 130 ms and ongoing upgrades like Raptr, Zaptos, and Shardines toward 1M TPS ambitions in testing.
Practical sustained rates shared in ecosystem reports point to tens of thousands TPS in specific settings, with much lower averages during normal network use.
How to read these metrics
Lab vs live: Somnia’s million‑TPS line sits in the same bucket as Solana’s and Aptos’s stress‑test peaks; what matters is sustained throughput and latency percentiles during real usage spikes.
Finality vs inclusion: Sub‑second “finality” on Somnia refers to consensus‑level commitment after its ordering layer, while other chains often quote optimistic confirmation before economic finality. Compare like‑for‑like.
Bandwidth and fees: Somnia leans on compression and signature aggregation to keep per‑tx bytes low, which is crucial for maintaining speed and sub‑cent fees under load. That’s comparable in spirit to Solana’s and Aptos’s focus on efficient runtime and networking.
Bottom line
On paper, Somnia sits at the top end of L1 speed claims, with architecture designed for high parallel data ingestion and fast final ordering; early dashboards reflect that positioning.
In production reality, Solana and Aptos have demonstrated strong performance with credible sub‑second or near‑sub‑second confirmations in some cases, but their average real‑world TPS is far below peak claims. Expect Somnia’s live numbers to follow a similar pattern until proven by sustained, organic traffic.
If a like‑for‑like benchmark is needed, the next step is to pull synchronized telemetry snapshots for Somnia, Solana, and Aptos during similar load windows and compute median TPS and p95 finality; that removes marketing bias and tells the practical story.
