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Short answer: Neither network is the universal winner. Solana publishes a base fee of 5,000 lamports per signature, optional priority fees, about 400 ms payment settlement, and a median fee near $0.001 in its payments guide. NEAR publishes gas fees usually measured in fractions of a penny, 600 ms blocks, 1.2-second finality, nine shards, and a 1M TPS scalability benchmark. Those figures measure different things and come from issuer documentation, so they are not a like-for-like performance test.
Choose based on the exact transaction, the completion assurance your application needs, whether you need a single composable state or sharded scaling and cross-chain execution, and how you will operate wallets, RPC access, retries, and fee budgets. The figures below were checked against official network material on October 13, 2026.
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The comparison in one view
NEAR and Solana both target fast, inexpensive blockchain use, but their published metrics describe different layers of the experience. A block or slot interval is not the same as confirmation, and confirmation is not the same as economic finality. A benchmark capacity claim is not a promise that an ordinary user transaction will see that throughput.
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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute| Network | Published fee information | Published timing information | Capacity or ecosystem figures | How to read the figure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NEAR | Contract interactions and token transfers generally cost fractions of a penny; fees are gas-based. | 600 ms block time; 1.2 second finality. | 1M TPS scalability claim; nine shards. | Figures are from NEAR’s current protocol overview. The 1M TPS number is a publicly verifiable benchmark described in a 2025 milestones post, not routine observed user throughput. |
| Solana | 5,000 lamports per signature base fee, plus an optional priority fee. A payments guide reports a median fee of approximately $0.001. | Approximately 400 ms settlement in the payments guide. | More than $1 trillion in stablecoin volume reported for 2025. | The settlement number is a payment-oriented issuer claim. Actual total fees vary with signatures, compute-unit pricing, limits, congestion, and the SOL price. |
The most defensible conclusion is conditional: Solana offers a clearly documented per-signature fee formula and a global-state execution model; NEAR offers gas-based pricing, sharded scaling, and a published finality figure. A person choosing a network should match the comparison to the intended action rather than rank the headline numbers.
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Which is cheaper, NEAR or Solana?
For a simple dollar comparison, there is no permanent winner. Both native tokens fluctuate in price, and the amount of computation or data in a transaction changes the charge. Solana’s documentation exposes a base amount in lamports, while NEAR documentation describes typical costs qualitatively as fractions of a penny. The right comparison is the total cost of the same action, recorded in native units and converted to dollars at the same time.
How Solana charges
Every Solana transaction pays a fee in SOL. The documented base fee is 5,000 lamports per signature. A transaction can also include a priority fee to improve scheduling priority. The priority component is determined by the requested compute-unit price and compute-unit limit, so two transactions that perform different work can pay different totals. The base fee is split equally between burning and the validator; the priority fee goes to the validator.
A failed transaction still pays its fee. Solana’s transaction documentation also states that if any instruction fails, the entire transaction fails and all state changes are reverted. That combination matters for budgeting: a failed swap or transfer may leave no intended state change while still consuming the fee, and a higher priority price is not a guarantee that the underlying instruction will succeed.
How NEAR charges
NEAR uses a gas-based model. Contract interactions and token transfers incur a fee, and official documentation commonly describes the amount as a fraction of a penny. That description is not a fixed price list: gas use depends on the action, the contract, and the amount of work performed, while the dollar value depends on the current NEAR token price.
Do not turn the phrase fraction of a penny into a universal charge. A token transfer, a contract call with several state changes, and a cross-chain operation can consume different gas amounts. Use the transaction’s actual gas usage and the contemporaneous token price when planning a budget.
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What the published $0.001 Solana figure means
Solana Foundation’s payments guide reports a median fee of approximately $0.001 per transaction while describing 2025 stablecoin activity. It is an issuer-published median, not a guarantee for every transaction and not necessarily the cost of a complex application call. The same guide reports more than $1 trillion in stablecoin volume for 2025; volume does not tell you what your own transaction will cost.
A practical fee comparison method
- Define one action, such as a native transfer, a token transfer, a swap, or a contract call. Do not compare a simple transfer on one chain with a multi-instruction application transaction on the other.
- Record the native fee actually quoted or paid. For Solana, capture the signature count, base fee, compute-unit limit, compute-unit price, and any priority fee. For NEAR, capture gas used and the gas price shown for the transaction.
- Record whether the transaction completed, was retried, or failed. Include fees paid by failed attempts.
- Convert both native totals to the same fiat currency using prices observed at the same timestamp. A dollar comparison made on different days can reverse when token prices move.
- Repeat over a stated time window and report a median and a range rather than one unusually cheap or expensive transaction.
Is NEAR faster than Solana?
That question has no reliable yes-or-no answer until “faster” is defined. Block or slot production, a wallet’s confirmation indicator, and irreversible finality are separate milestones. Solana’s terminology documentation defines confirmation time as the wall-clock interval from a leader creating a tick entry to a confirmed block. It defines finality as the point at which two-thirds of stake has a common root. NEAR’s headline numbers identify a 600 ms block time and 1.2-second finality.
NEAR’s published timing and capacity claims
NEAR’s current protocol overview lists 600 ms block time, 1.2-second finality, nine shards, and a 1M TPS scalability claim. A 2025 milestones update says the mainnet expanded from six to nine shards, increasing network throughput by 50%. That update characterizes the million-TPS figure as a publicly verifiable benchmark built with NEAR core code, consumer-grade hardware, and scripts.
A benchmark demonstrates what the system achieved under the benchmark’s setup. It does not establish the latency or throughput a typical wallet user will experience under a particular application load. Treat the finality figure as NEAR’s own published claim and ask what level of assurance your application actually requires.
Solana’s published timing
Solana Foundation’s payments guide describes approximately 400 ms settlement. The guide is aimed at payment use cases, while the network terminology distinguishes confirmation from finality. Therefore, 400 ms settlement should not be placed in a table as though it were directly equivalent to NEAR’s 1.2-second finality. A payment interface may show a settled state before an application’s chosen finality policy is satisfied.
What an apples-to-apples speed test would require
- Use the same transaction type and comparable transaction size on both networks.
- Define the completion event: submission acknowledgement, confirmation, or finality.
- Measure median, 95th-percentile, and worst-case times, not only the fastest observation.
- Count failed and retried submissions, including the fee paid for each attempt.
- Run both tests in the same time window and document the client, RPC location, network conditions, and token price used for fee conversion.
No source cited for this comparison supplies a neutral, same-window, matched-workload latency test. Consequently, the official headline figures cannot prove a definitive real-world speed winner.
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How the architectures differ
NEAR: sharded execution
NEAR presents Nightshade as a sharded architecture whose capacity scales with the number of shards. Its current overview says the network has nine shards and can dynamically add or remove them. Sharding separates portions of execution and state so the network can expand capacity without treating every transaction as work for one undivided state machine.
For a product team, that design makes scaling strategy and cross-shard behavior important. Measure the latency and gas of the exact contract paths you will use, especially when an operation touches multiple accounts or services. The presence of nine shards alone does not tell you the cost or user experience of a particular application.
Solana: one global state and atomic composition
Solana’s official DeFi material emphasizes a single global state and atomic composition among programs such as decentralized exchanges, lending markets, oracles, and perpetuals. In practical terms, an application can design a transaction that composes several instructions while relying on the transaction’s all-or-nothing state-change rule: if one instruction fails, all state changes are reverted.
This model can be attractive when a product depends on tightly coupled financial operations. It also means developers must plan compute usage, account access, priority fees, and failure handling. A transaction that is economically useful but computationally heavy can have a different fee and scheduling profile from a simple transfer.
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Which ecosystem is better?
“Better ecosystem” is not a single measurable property. Liquidity, application composability, developer tooling, infrastructure availability, user distribution, and the specific assets your product needs can point in different directions. The official material presents distinguishable emphases rather than a universal ranking.
NEAR’s ecosystem emphasis
NEAR’s ecosystem materials emphasize sharded scaling, cross-chain Intents, and chain abstraction. A 2025 ecosystem update reports more than $7 billion in all-time Intents volume, 13 million swaps, and over 125 supported assets. Those are dated issuer figures for the Intents initiative, not a directly comparable measurement of Solana’s entire decentralized-finance activity.
Intents are presented as cross-chain execution infrastructure: a user or application expresses a desired outcome, and the system coordinates execution across supported assets or networks. If your product’s differentiator is routing or execution across chains, investigate supported assets, solver or executor requirements, failure recovery, and the exact finality assumptions before treating the headline volume as evidence of fit.
Solana’s ecosystem emphasis
Solana’s ecosystem materials emphasize composable decentralized finance, payments, tokenization, and a developer stack that includes resources for games, templates, migration, and infrastructure. The DeFi guide highlights interactions among exchanges, lending markets, oracles, and perpetuals within a single global state. The payments guide cites more than $1 trillion in stablecoin volume for 2025, but that figure is an issuer report and should not be compared with NEAR’s Intents volume without matching definitions and periods.
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Choosing by application
| Application need | Questions to answer | Evidence that matters |
|---|---|---|
| Simple payments or transfers | What settlement state can the recipient accept, and what fee volatility can the payer tolerate? | Same-action fee samples, confirmation policy, failed-payment rate, and wallet support. |
| Trading and DeFi composition | Does the workflow need several programs to execute atomically, and how sensitive is it to scheduling? | Available markets, liquidity for the exact assets, compute or gas use, slippage, retries, and finality handling. |
| Cross-chain execution | Which source and destination assets are supported, and who handles execution or recovery? | Supported assets, Intents routes, bridge or executor assumptions, historical completion times, and failure procedures. |
| Tokenization | What issuance, transfer, compliance, and reporting functions are required? | Token standards and tooling for the chosen chain, RPC history, operational controls, and the assurance level required by counterparties. |
| High-throughput application | Is the requirement a benchmark capacity, predictable user latency, or both? | Matched-load measurements, tail latency, error rates, infrastructure cost, and scaling behavior under the expected workload. |
A decision framework for individuals and teams
Choose NEAR when the defining requirement is sharded or cross-chain execution
NEAR is the more natural starting point when your design depends on Nightshade’s sharded model, dynamically scalable shard capacity, or the cross-chain Intents and chain-abstraction direction highlighted in NEAR’s ecosystem material. Validate the actual gas profile of your contract and the routes your users need; the network’s fractions-of-a-penny description is not a fixed quote.
Choose Solana when single-state composability is central
Solana is a logical candidate when your application relies on atomic composition among financial programs, payment flows, tokenization, or the developer resources surrounding that stack. Budget for the base fee, potential priority fees, and the fact that failed submissions still incur fees. Production operations also require an RPC plan rather than dependence on public shared endpoints.
Keep both candidates when the requirement is only “fast and cheap”
Those labels are too broad to decide a network. Build a small test matrix for the exact transfer, contract call, or swap; define finality; and compare cost, completion time, error handling, wallet availability, liquidity, and infrastructure effort. The network with the lower headline number may be the worse fit if it lacks the route, asset, or operational controls your application needs.
Common comparison mistakes
- Equating settlement with finality: a 400 ms payment-oriented settlement claim and a 1.2-second finality claim describe different assurance states.
- Comparing a benchmark with observed throughput: NEAR’s 1M TPS figure is a benchmark claim, not a promise of routine mainnet user throughput.
- Using one fixed dollar fee: SOL and NEAR prices move, Solana priority fees vary, and NEAR gas usage varies by action.
- Ignoring signatures and compute: Solana’s base fee is per signature, while compute-unit pricing and limits can add a priority fee.
- Ignoring failed attempts: Solana charges a fee even when a transaction fails; retries can multiply the amount spent.
- Mixing ecosystem measurements: NEAR’s Intents volume, Solana’s stablecoin volume, and DeFi totals use different scopes and definitions.
- Relying on public RPC for production: public shared endpoints may be useful for exploration but are not intended as a production capacity plan.
What to monitor after choosing
Network conditions and ecosystem figures change. Recheck block or slot timing, finality behavior, fee schedules, token prices, supported assets, RPC capacity, and application activity before committing a long-lived product or treasury policy. Keep an internal record of the observation date and measurement method for every cost or latency figure.
For personal use, monitor the fee shown by the wallet before signing, the recipient’s required confirmation state, and whether a transaction is pending, confirmed, finalized, or failed. For a business, add alerts for fee spikes, retry rates, RPC errors, delayed finality, and depleted fee balances. These controls matter more than choosing between two isolated headline numbers.
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