Solana Grappled with Congestion Issues, Developers Rushing to Devise Solutions

Reported by The Block, in recent days, the Solana network has grappled with congestion issues, leading to noticeable delays in transaction processing and a large number of transactions being dropped.

Users of the popular Phantom wallet app on Solana and other apps have notified users of congestion, advising them to expect longer wait times for their transactions to complete.

The congestion affecting the network is largely due to an influx of spam transactions, with bots attempting to prioritize their activities over those of regular users. This issue is exacerbated by a dramatic increase in transactions associated with newly released memecoins, creating an extraordinary demand for the network’s block space and resulting in impeded access for many users.

In the first quarter of 2024, the Solana blockchain experienced a significant uptick in memecoin activity, and the number of new tokens appearing on Solana DEXs reached a record high during this time period.

This increase in activity, large driven around meme coins, underscores the rising interest in Solana among new and retail users, attracted by the network’s affordable transaction fees. However, the influx of spam transactions has emerged as a bottleneck for the network.

Matt Sorg, a tech and product leader at the Solana Foundation, drew a comparison between Solana’s architecture and the internet’s infrastructure. In Solana’s setup, individual validators process transactions without the use of a mempool, similar to how IP endpoints and servers operate on the internet.

Sorg explained that the network dispatches transactions directly to block leaders, bypassing any staging model or mempool where transactions might wait before being added to the chain. He suggested that an overload of spam transactions could overwhelm this system, potentially resulting in many transactions being dropped.

“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.

In response to these challenges, the Solana development team is devising effective solutions, and software patches are already being worked on but will take some time, according to co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.