The Solana network has experienced congestion in recent days, resulting in a significant drop in transactions and significant delays in transaction processing.

Congestion has been reported by users of the popular Phantom Wallet app on Solana and other apps, warning users to expect long waiting times for their transactions to complete.

The network is experiencing congestion mostly as a result of an increase in spam transactions, as bots try to take precedence over the actions of authentic users. The problem is exacerbated by the rapid increase in transactions associated with the recently released memecoins, which puts a huge strain on the network's block space and makes it difficult for many users to use it. Is.

Memecoin activity on the Solana blockchain increased significantly in the first quarter of 2024, and at that time, a record number of new tokens appeared on the Solana DEXs.

This increase in activity, which is mostly focused on the meme coin, highlights how new and retail users are becoming more interested in Solana due to the network's low transaction costs. But the increase in spam transactions has proven to be a bottleneck for the network.

Solana Foundation's Matt Sorg, a tech and product leader, drew a parallel between Internet infrastructure and Solana's architecture. Like IP endpoints and servers on the Internet, individual authenticators handle transactions in a Solana configuration without the need for a memory pool.

Sorg explained that instead of using a mempool or staging model where transactions can wait to be added to the chain, the network sends transactions directly to block leaders. He warned that the system could be flooded with spam transactions, which could cause a large number of transactions to be lost.

"There's a problem with this Solana method, which means the user doesn't have a reliable way to add transactions to blocks”. Sorg said in an X post. 

Solana’s Congestion Issues

Solana has been experiencing traffic issues lately due to the meme coin frenzy. The increase in meme currency activity has resulted in strong demand for the network, which has also led to a significant increase in user activity. Solana's transaction volume reached $4 billion in March. To put things in perspective, the average daily transaction volume in 2023 was around $500 million. According to Solana developer 0xMert, the astronomically high use of bots has resulted in an increase in failed transactions on the Solana network.

The final version, according to 0xMert, gives good transactions or validators with significant stake priority. This priority prevents low-quality validators from flooding the network with transactions and provides more service to high-stakeholder validators. After the upgrade, Solana customers expect the network to resume normal operations.

Strategies to Combat Congestion

According to co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, the Solana development team is coming up with practical answers to these problems, and software updates are already being rolled out but will take some time.

"A huge flood of traffic is once again putting the Solana network to the test. Things will start to improve with the implementation of the big patch over the next week, according to Austin Phaedra, chief strategic officer at the Solana Foundation.

The network infrastructure may become congested at this point, which will affect the ability of users to interact with the blockchain. To that end, Solana's Agave validator client developer, Anza, will release patches that address specific issues with its QUIC implementation. It is expected that these modifications will improve the performance of the client, especially in situations where there are many requests.

The April release date of the 1.18 upgrade is another significant development. The upgrade aims to reduce bottlenecks and streamline processing by introducing modifications to make transaction scheduling more precise.

Next, there is the issue of charging priority. Many apps running on Solana don't use priority fees, causing transactions to either fail or take a long time to process. According to a Solana Labs blog article from March, integrating dynamic priority fees into dApps will help solve user experience issues.

What’s New in Solana’s upgrade v1.17.31?

Rex St. John, director of developer relations at Anza, discussed the features of this upgrade in a message on X.

Anza is a Solana-based dev shop that creates developer tools, the Solana client, and more.

According to him, customers are looking forward to the first wave of Solana mainnet congestion fixes, which are included in the rollout. Additionally, they clarified that this is not version 1.18. More upgrades will be released later.

Modifications in the latest version relate to the display of stacked versus non-stacked packets that are throttled or sent down.

The update further limits minimum streaming to every 100ms for stacked nodes and, among other things, extremely low stacks are considered untainted in streamer QOS.

In the midst of the memecoin frenzy, Solana faced congestion issues last month as trading volume hit $4 billion. In 2023, the average amount was $500 million per day.

According to Meerut Mumtaz, CEO of Helios Labs, the company that only provides back-end support to the Solana network, Solana's current problem is an implementation flaw rather than a design flaw.

Fortunately, the update that the developers promised for today has arrived and is ready for verifiers to use.

After the update, users expect the Solana environment to return to normal. As of the writing of this post, SOL on CoinMarketCap is up 7% over the last day, trading at $153.