Solana News published a piece on payment channels that targets up to one million payments per second by using a model where an agent’s spending authority is granted once and subsequent payments occur within the channel.
The important distinction is between channel throughput and base-layer throughput. When every micropayment does not need to become a separate globally processed transaction, many intermediate transfers can occur away from the shared state path while the L1 is used for channel setup, controls or final settlement.
That architecture is particularly relevant to machine and autonomous-agent payments where individual amounts can be small while transaction frequency is very high. The economics only make sense when signing, verification and settlement overhead stay below the value of the activity and channel rules constrain unauthorized spending.
The one-million-per-second figure should therefore be read as a property of the specific payment-channel design and test scenario, not as Solana’s ordinary global TPS. Practical impact on SOL depends on real channel adoption, settlement activity, failure handling and which applications actually use the model.