mert@mert
this might be one of the most deceptive marketing tricks I've seen in crypto — it's particularly nasty because 99.99% of ppl have no idea how this works
since I'm sure the snake-oil marketing won't stop, here are the facts:
jesse says base will be "faster" than solana because base will use flashblocks
what are flashblocks?
if you look at the *original post where flashbots themselves introduce it*, they are loosely shreds from solana (see screenshot)
ok so what are shreds on solana?
on solana, a block is split into smaller pieces called "shreds." these are transmitted across the network independently
while solana blocktime is 400ms, solana doesn't wait for 400ms to broadcast txns from the leader — txns are batched and solana streams these batches via turbine. each batch has 32 shreds, so the measured "blocktime" is around 20 ms (roughly)
these batches are interleaved into Proof-of-History and executed as they arrive. and if they're executed, they're visible on the nodes under "processed" commitment, so in the optimistic scenario, a full node reading state also sees the changes much faster and more realtime than 250ms (i.e. around 15-20 ms). naturally it has to go through confirmations, thats why it is "optimistic" — and also why it's false to equate these to L1 blocktimes
(also blocktime is not block propagation time. while blocktime talks about how much time lapse there is between leader producing blocks, it doesn't measure how long a block takes to be propagated across the network. solana turbine is SOTA here because it uses UDP + FEC which is way lower latency than using tcp or other handshake based protocols — I'm not even going to mention the 65,000 other things that contribute to actual latency in a real life setting like read layer propagation)
so to be clear, base:
> takes a solana concept called shreds
> calls them "blocks" (which even solana doesn't do)
> says their "blocks" are now faster than solana's
if of course, they just called them shreds like solana, then they are not faster
if of course, solana just relabeled blocks as shreds to farm Kaito points, then they are again not faster (in fact, they are somehow much slower)
and again, it's a category error to compare L2 preconfs to L1 blocktimes — this is like saying helicopters fly faster than jet planes because helicopters can take off vertically while jet planes take off horizontally — no. we are not even driving the same vehicle
what's more is that 400ms on solana is just a constant, we're barely looking at it because there are much more important problems to solve than empty twitter posturing
this number can at least be halved with some real engineering without compromising to multisig aws servers for the future of the industry — not even 2 weeks ago a core dev was getting < 65ms blocktimes at 4.5k tps on solana lmao
we are not playing the same game
slop all you want about morals and memecoins, but make sure you know that you're dealing with real engineers when it comes to the tech on solana
a much less absurd framing would've been that you are scaling the EVM and this should be celebrated — not making up nonsense about other chains which you are clueless about
