The latest drop from the Talking Tokens Podcast just hit, and it’s a must-listen for anyone deep in the Solana ecosystem – especially meme coin degens who live and die by block times and slippage.

Host Jacqueline (award-nominated as always) brought on Ben (@HypoNyms)​, co-founder of Harmonic.gg (and founding engineer at Temporal), to talk about their ambitious plan: turn Solana into an “onchain Nasdaq” with open, competitive block building and a realistic path to 1 million TPS.

Yes, you read that right – one million transactions per second.

Why this matters for meme coins

Solana already dominates meme coin volume. Launches happen in seconds, pumps go parabolic, and dumps hit even faster. But right now a lot of that speed comes with pain points:

• Sandwich attacks eating retail fills
• Jito bundles that sometimes feel like pay-to-win
• Congestion when every degen on earth is aping the same cat token

Harmonic wants to fix the root cause by opening up block production to real competition while letting apps decide exactly how their transactions get sequenced.

Quick background on Ben

• Math/CS background
• Interned at Citadel Securities and Akuna Capital (big-boy HFT firms)
• Left TradFi because centralized markets are opaque and full of “he-said-she-said” games
• Fell in love with Solana in 2021 when he sent his first transaction and it confirmed instantly – faster than many CeFi apps at the time

The big idea: Open block building + ACE

Right now Solana validators sequence everything themselves, and rules can differ wildly between validators. That creates unpredictability.

Harmonic is building an open marketplace where multiple block builders compete to give apps the exact execution rules they want – think speed bumps for takers, guaranteed inclusion for liquidators, or whatever else a protocol needs.

This is enabled by ACE – Application Controlled Execution, a new primitive that lets apps tag transactions with custom sequencing instructions.

Result?

• Builders compete → higher chain revenue goes up
• Toxic MEV practices get priced out
• Apps get predictability even at insane throughput
• Retail traders (yes, you) get fairer fills on Raydium, Jupiter, Pump.fun, etc.

Ben’s take: “We’re giving applications the rules they want and doing it at millions and millions of TPS.”

The 1 million TPS claim – hype or real?

Ben says the hardware and core client work (shoutout to Jito, Firedancer, and the Anza team) is already there. Solana handled recent crashes with zero downtime.

The missing piece was giving apps the final features they kept begging for. With open competition at the builder layer, he believes 10–100× current throughput is realistic short-term, and 1M TPS is the long-term ceiling with sustainable decentralization.

Translation for meme traders: imagine sniping a launch or dumping the top without praying your tx doesn’t get dropped or sandwiched. That future might be closer than we think.

Timestamps (so you skip the fluff)

00:00 – Intro & Solana’s progress
01:03 – “Onchain Nasdaq” explained
02:15 – Ben’s TradFi → Crypto journey
08:50 – Deep dive on Harmonic
11:35 – What ACE actually does
14:04 – Competition in block production
18:06 – Path to 1M TPS
31:04 – Advice: ignore short-term noise, keep building

Watch the full episode here on X

If you trade memes on Solana, this is the kind of infrastructure upgrade that could separate the next bull run from the last one. Fairer markets, insane speed, and less rent extraction from searchers = more money staying in degen pockets.

Keep building, keep aping responsibly, and see you at 1 million TPS. 🚀