⚡ Why Solana?

With respect to Ethereum — Matsuri's use case needed a different set of physics.

Ethereum brought smart contracts to the world and opened the cultures of DeFi and NFTs; the security and track record built by its community remain unmatched. But what Matsuri Coin (MTC) must support is everyday payment on the ground at tourism sites — a ¥300 tip to a guide, a 10-MTC omikuji draw at a shrine. That job does not tolerate fees of hundreds of yen or waits of tens of seconds.

~0.4sFinalitysettlement you can watch happen

~$0.0003Typical feeabout ¥0.04 per transfer

2,000+Real TPS65,000 theoretical (Q1 2026)

Standing on Ethereum's shoulders

Without the foundation Ethereum built, neither Solana nor today's Web3 would exist. The comparison below is about fit for a specific job, not superiority.

	Ethereum	Solana
Transfer fee	Hundreds to thousands of yen (~$2–$20)	¥0.04 ($0.0003)
Settlement speed	12 seconds to several minutes	~0.4 seconds
Throughput	~15 per second	Thousands per second
Strength	High-value settlement, deep DeFi, security-critical use	High-frequency micro-payments, real-time consumer UX

Ethereum's steady, proven gait — and the Shinkansen that Matsuri's use case required.

For real tourism demand × high-frequency micro-settlement, at this moment, only Solana meets the requirement.

The micro-transaction test

Two of Matsuri's most human moments are also its smallest transactions — and they decide the chain.

• A ¥300 tip. After a tour, guests tip their guide from preset chips starting at ¥300 (live-stream tips start from ¥100). On a rail charging $2–$20 per transaction, the fee devours the gratitude. On Solana, the ~¥0.04 fee vanishes into rounding.
• A 10-MTC omikuji draw. The AR omikuji (お神籤 — fortune slip) reward at a sacred site starts from a 10 MTC base, and a 大吉 (daikichi — great blessing) can mint a 御朱印 (goshuin — shrine seal) NFT. Rewards this granular only make sense when the cost of moving value is effectively zero. The full mechanics live in Mining.

The economic rationality of osaisen (お賽銭 — offering money)

For the feeling of tossing a 100-yen coin into a shrine's offering box to work as a digital micro-payment, the fee must stay far below the offering itself. That is the entire chain decision, in one gesture.

Proof, not projection

This is not a benchmark from a lab — it is a real Matsuri booking settled through Phantom in production.

A real 3,500 MTC booking approved in Phantom — network fee $0.0068

1. Guest taps pay

   The app asks our Django backend to compose the transaction — apps never talk to Solana directly, and prices are always recomputed server-side.
2. Phantom approves

   Solana Pay / Phantom deep-link, with resume support if the payment is interrupted.
3. Finality in ~0.4 seconds

   The backend verifies the transaction on-chain and the booking, tip, or draw settles instantly.

Architecture detail — why the backend sits between app and chain — is in Product & Technology.

The numbers behind the choice (Q1 2026)

$117BDEX volume — Q1 2026world #1, more than 2× Ethereum's $52B

$650BStablecoin volume/month — Q1 2026record high, 5.3M+ addresses

$0.007Average fee — Q1 2026down 85.2% year over year

+83%Developer growth — Q1 2026vs +12% for Ethereum (Electric Capital)

Solana's chain revenue in the same period ran about $1.03M per 24 hours — roughly five times the combined L2 basket.

Where Ethereum still leads

By market cap (~$230B vs $50B) and DeFi TVL ($54B vs ~$5.7B), Ethereum leads by a wide margin as of Q1 2026. Solana's growth story is speed, cost, and real usage — exactly the axes Matsuri's use case depends on.

The chain is the rail; the economics riding on it are the subject of Tokenomics.