A lot of Solanas throughput is consensus messages between validators.

But finance in general is many orders of magnitude more TPS than visa. Think about high frequency trading of derivatives of all sorts of things, and all the tiny arbitrages that can be done over all the exchanges when fees are cents. Those can easily multiply to thousands of TPS.

Wash trading bots can create as much volume as you want.

That’s literally what Sol was designed to do. Plus taking 20% of all NFT traffic in a year is a huge part of it. Even with consensus messages removed Sol still does more transactions than all the L2s combined.

But why is this the case when their volume is nowhere near that percentage of the L2 chains too? What exactly does the tx count include?

Got a reference for volume? Sol had either the most or second most active wallets.