Several transactions have been dropped due to congestion issues on the Solana network in recent days. People using the popular Phantom wallet app on Solana and other apps have been warned of congestion and must expect longer wait times.
Congestion is mostly caused by spam transactions, with bots trying to prioritize their activities over regular users. There’s an extreme increase in transactions associated with newly released meme coins, causing an extraordinarily high demand for network space and causing a lot of users to be unable to access it.
Why the congestion?
Meme coin activity increased significantly on the Solana blockchain in the first quarter of 2024. During this time period, Solana DEXs saw a record number of token additions.
With their affordable transaction fees, new and retail users are increasingly interested in Solana due to the increased activity, mostly surrounding meme coins. However, the influx of spam transactions has posed a stumbling block to the network’s growth.
A product and tech lead at the Solana Foundation Matt Sorg compared Solana’s architecture and the internet’s infrastructure.
By bypassing any staging model or mempool where transactions might have to wait before being added to the chain, Sorg explained that the network dispatches transactions directly to block leaders. An overload of spam transactions could overwhelm this system causing many transactions to be dropped, he suggested.
“There’s an issue with this process on Solana, resulting in a user not having a reliable way to get transactions included into blocks. The systems in place for fees and stake-weighted transactions aren’t being reached,” Sorg wrote in an X post.
Combat strategies
As a response to these challenges, the Solana development team is coming up with effective solutions. Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder, says software patches are already in the works but will take some time.
Strategy lead at Solana Foundation Austin Federa further noted, “The Solana network is, once again, being battle tested with a huge influx of traffic. Bug fixes are rolling out over the next week, and things will start to improve.”
It could affect users’ ability to interact with the blockchain if this congestion extends into the network’s infrastructure. This is why Anza, the developer of Solana’s Agave validator client, will fix specific QUIC implementation issues. In scenarios with high request volumes these updates should boost the client’s performance.
As of publication, SOL’s down over 7% in the past week and is changing hands at $182, as per data from Coin Market Cap.
Also, the 1.18 update is scheduled for release in April. As a result of this update, transaction scheduling will become more deterministic which should streamline processing and reduce bottlenecks.
Priority fees are another thing to consider. Many Solana apps don’t use priority fees, resulting in delayed or non-processed transactions. According to a March blog post from Solana Labs, dynamic priority fees will reportedly help solve user experience issues.
