Solana Foundation Details Payment Channel Performance and Recovery Risks

The Solana Foundation announced a benchmark for its payment-channel system, recording more than one million payments per second using 100,000 unique wallets. This performance figure was achieved on a 128-core AVX-512 host during a 10-minute test. The system utilizes a proxy to process authorizations off-chain, which reduces the necessity for individual blockchain transactions for every service delivery.

The benchmark reflects a test workload rather than commercial demand and does not account for durable session storage, which would introduce additional latency. The Foundation noted that Alibaba Cloud API endpoints were live at launch, and the program repository includes a mainnet deployment.

The payment channel architecture involves three parties: the customer, who funds the channel; the merchant, who provides services; and the operator, who manages the payment process. Risks arise if an operator becomes unresponsive, as customers require a funded transaction submitter to recover deposits, while merchants must ensure their final bills are recorded on-chain before a grace period expires.

The specification recommends a 15-minute grace period, or 900 seconds, which begins once a forced-close request is recorded on-chain. If a merchant fails to submit a final bill before this window closes, the funds may become uncollectible. Once a channel is sealed, customer refunds are calculated based on the recorded total rather than any subsequent reconstruction of billing.

The system supports two signing modes: client mode, where the customer signs vouchers, and operator mode, where the operator signs them. The specific terms, including the grace period and signing mode, depend on the individual channel configuration. The Foundation warned that restarting an in-memory store can result in the loss of vouchers that were accepted but not yet settled.