We explained why Pálpito runs on-chain: quality, auditability, transparency, and control, written to a blockchain. What we didn't cover is the decision that came right after: to build the level of product we're aiming for, you need a chain that raises the bar too.

We looked hard at the alternatives, Ethereum and its rollups above all, because that's where most of on-chain finance lives today. But we chose Solana. Here's why.

Execution for Parallel Markets

On Solana, every transaction declares up front exactly what it's going to touch at the memory level, and it can't touch anything else. That one rule changes everything. Because the network knows in advance what each transaction needs, it can run the ones that don't overlap at the same time. The EVM can't do that: it only discovers what a transaction touches while running it, so it has to process them sequentially.

For us this is concrete: two users trading different markets on Pálpito never wait in the same line. Every market is its own lane.

And everything happens in one place. Ethereum solved its capacity problem by spreading activity across dozens of separate networks, the L2s. It works, but it leaves the money fragmented across islands connected by bridges. Solana keeps it all on a single chain, and a market works best when all the liquidity is in the same atomic room.

Speed That Keeps Up With the Pace

Solana produces a block every 400 milliseconds, helped by Proof of History, a cryptographic clock that orders events before consensus even starts. Ethereum produces a block every 12 seconds and takes around 13 minutes to reach finality.

Today, finality on Solana sits around 12 seconds. With Alpenglow, an upgrade validators have already approved and that's expected on mainnet by late 2026, it drops to roughly 150 milliseconds. Speed, for us and for them, is a priority.

On raw capacity, Solana sustains 3,000 to 5,000 transactions per second; Ethereum L1 handles between 15 and 60.

Fees for Operations

On Solana, fees are a fraction of a cent, and they stay there no matter how busy the network gets. When one market heats up, that market gets a little more expensive on its own; everything around it keeps costing the same. On Ethereum it's the opposite: when something congests the network, everyone pays for it, whether it involves them or not.

That predictability lets us do something simple for our users: we pay their fees. They're so low and so stable that we can absorb them entirely. So people trade on Pálpito without ever buying SOL or thinking about gas, while their funds stay self-custodied.

Security at the Core

Solana programs are written in Rust, a language built to catch entire categories of bugs before the code ever ships. On top of that we use Anchor, a framework that verifies everything a transaction brings in before our logic runs. If something doesn't check out, the transaction fails in testing, long before it can fail with real funds.

The chain adds its own layer: several of the attack patterns behind the largest hacks in crypto history are simply impossible on Solana, ruled out by design. Security here is not a trade-off. It's built into the foundation we build on.

What This Adds Up To

Every argument above points the same way:

• Parallelism — optimal execution.
• Speed — blocks produced fast with low finality.
• Predictable costs — fees so low and stable that we cover them ourselves, so users never deal with gas.
• Safety by construction — whole classes of attacks ruled out of the box.

There's one more reason: direction. When you choose a chain, you're choosing direction, and every Solana upgrade pushes exactly the way Pálpito needs: less latency, more throughput, all on the base layer.

Speed. Throughput. Predictability. Safety. Everything Pálpito needs, on one chain. That's why we build here.

by Juan Manuel Villarraza