According to The Block, the Solana network has recently faced congestion problems, resulting in significant delays in transaction processing and a large number of transactions being discarded.
Users of the popular Phantom Wallet app on Solana and other applications have notified users of the congestion and advised them to expect longer wait times for transactions to complete.
The network congestion was primarily caused by an influx of spam transactions, with bots attempting to prioritize their activity over that of regular users. This problem was exacerbated by a surge in the number of transactions associated with the newly released memecoin, which created an extraordinary demand for the network’s block space, rendering many users unable to access it properly.
The Solana blockchain saw a significant increase in meme coin activity during the first quarter of 2024, with a record number of new tokens appearing on the Solana DEX during this period.
This increase in activity, mostly around memecoins, highlights the growing interest in Solana from new and retail users who are attracted to the network’s affordable transaction fees. However, the influx of junk transactions has become a bottleneck for the network.
Matt Sorg, head of technology and product at the Solana Foundation, compared Solana’s architecture to the infrastructure of the internet. In Solana’s setup, individual validators process transactions without the use of a memory pool, 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 memory pool where transactions wait to be added to the chain. He noted that an overload of junk transactions could overwhelm this system, potentially causing many transactions to be discarded.
"There are issues with this process on Solana that prevent users from reliably including transactions in blocks," Sorg wrote in an X post. "The existing system involving fees and stake-weighted transactions was not touched."
To address these challenges, the Solana development team is working on effective solutions and is already developing software patches, but it will take some time, said co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.
Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, further noted: “The Solana network is once again facing a test with a large amount of traffic. Bug fixes will be rolled out over the next week, and the situation will start to improve.”
