Solana: Exceptional Performance, Urgent Infrastructure Needs

Solana stands out in the web3 industry with its exceptional performance, capable of continuing to generate blocks under massive workloads.

Solana is renowned within the web3 domain for its exceptional performance, capable of continuing to generate blocks even under massive workloads. However, its infrastructure is in urgent need of upgrades, and new ideas can be introduced in its building methods. The launch of the $TRUMP and $MELANIA tokens serves as a clear example of this.

The tweet about $TRUMP released by the new U.S. President Donald Trump had a tremendous impact on the Solana ecosystem, bringing a surge of users and on-chain activity. Solana's daily trading volume set new records, with DEX trading volume reaching $27 billion. The on-chain trading volume of the Solana ecosystem alone is close to 1/10 of the entire Nasdaq's daily trading volume!

At the same time, this remarkable achievement also led to daily total gas fees reaching new highs, several times higher than the previous historical record! On January 19, 2025, users paid approximately $35 million in transaction fees, compared to $13 million on November 21, 2024. Meanwhile, the earnings of validators increased from $6.9 million to $17.7 million.

However, the gas fees being several times higher than normal does not equate to a smooth user experience, as on-chain transactions experienced anomalies: despite the record-breaking and stable generation of blocks, the number of on-chain transactions actually declined. Notably, Solana's congestion led to a lower-than-normal utilization of computational units (CUs) in blocks. This can be seen in block 315110102, which contained an unusually small number of unvoted transactions (15 transactions, one of which was rejected). Researcher @_weidai from @1kxnetwork proposed a possible reason: Solana has a bottleneck in network bandwidth, especially at the block proposer entry point.

The infrastructure failure of @Jito_labs was also one of the causes of this network congestion. After the launch of the $MELANIA token, the sending of Jito transactions was interrupted, and non-priority transactions effectively came to a halt. Due to the load reaching unprecedented levels, Jito's block engine API experienced significant failures, disrupting multiple services and Jito transaction submissions. (Most Solana nodes use Jito's client)

According to observations by @smyyyguy, the following occurred on the Solana chain:

Binance and #Coinbase users also encountered issues. According to data from @solscanofficial, transactions from Coinbase were rejected due to the inability to automatically increase transaction fees, and Coinbase also paused user withdrawals for a period. Even after several hours, Coinbase still faced withdrawal issues.

phantom, as the most popular wallet, also crashed under the flood of users and transactions, experiencing 8 million requests per minute, a staggering number! The enormous load on Phantom's infrastructure also manifested in some users being unable to update their balances or even load the wallet interface.

The result is that the Solana blockchain operates normally, but ordinary users cannot use it. During the most difficult times, the number of rejected non-voting transactions in blocks reached 40%-60%, similar to the situation in the spring of 2024. As we mentioned earlier, during the events of January 19-20, 2025, despite numerous user complaints, on-chain data did not show a significant number of failed congestions. This may be related to the decrease in computational units (CUs) within blocks.

Additionally, it is worth noting the decrease in the number of block signers. This indicates that the block distribution and signing process were also affected. This may have exacerbated the anomaly of relatively few congestion occurrences in the chart.

The reasons for transaction rejections are varied: sometimes transactions fail to enter blocks due to infrastructure overload; sometimes it is because transactions cannot keep up with price changes; and some transactions are rejected due to long waiting times—this is one of Solana's speed characteristics, namely the lack of a memory pool (mempool).

This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. If a transaction has a lower priority due to lower fees, it will not wait as it would on an EVM-based chain, but will be rejected in less than a minute.

Subsequently, the cost of "priority" transactions has increased significantly—from 0.2 SOL to 2 SOL ($50 to $540). Considering that this has been a persistent situation rather than a short-term phenomenon, Solana's fees are indeed outrageous. For example, you can see here that all transfer transactions with fees of 0.03-0.04 SOL ($7-10) are being rejected, causing losses to users.

The Lollipop development team had noticed the surge in priority transactions on Solana earlier, prompting us to think about how to improve the reliability of users and protocols. Although the chain can operate normally and generate blocks