Base vs Solana for agent fleets: throughput, finality, and what breaks at 10 wallets

Throughput isn't the bottleneck

Ten agent wallets, even paying every few seconds, are nowhere near either chain's real capacity limits. Neither Base nor Solana will struggle with the transaction volume a fleet this size generates; if you're choosing a network based on "which one can handle my agents' payment rate," that's not the deciding factor at this scale.

Where the difference actually shows up

Base finality (waiting for enough confirmations to treat a transfer as settled) is slower than Solana's, which matters if your reconciliation or budget alerts need to be near-real-time rather than eventually-consistent. On the ingest side, Solana's `getSignaturesForAddress`-based walk and Base's `eth_getLogs` block-range polling hit RPC rate limits differently under bursty load — we've tuned chunk sizes for both, but a fleet with several very active wallets on the same chain will exhaust a shared RPC budget faster than the same fleet split across both chains.

We haven't load-tested our own ingest specifically at 10 simultaneously-active wallets on one chain versus split across both — this section is reasoning from how the two ingest paths are built, not from a benchmark we've run, and we'd rather say that plainly than imply we've measured something we haven't.

What this means for your fleet

If near-real-time budget alerts matter more than raw throughput, lean Solana for finality speed. If you're already committed to Base for other reasons (existing tooling, USDC liquidity, whatever), ten wallets won't force a migration — just expect alerts to lag confirmations a bit more than they would on Solana.