The Spam Transaction Paradox, Why Do Your Solana Transactions Always Fail?

TL;DR

I believe many users still don’t know why their transactions on Solana always fail recently?

Let’s start with the basics – from a user’s perspective, when we make a transaction, basically three things happen:

The transaction was executed successfully without any errors;

The execution fails, for example, the gas fee is paid, but an error is returned during the execution. This usually occurs when the execution conditions are not met, for example, the token trying to mint has been minted, or the slippage exceeds the set value due to price fluctuations, etc.;

Undelivered transactions. This type of transaction does not appear anywhere, indicating that the transaction has not yet reached the “Block Leader” (Foresight News Note, the verifier responsible for processing transactions in a certain period of time). This is exactly A situation currently encountered by many users,This is a network layer issue, not a consensus/execution level issue;

You may be wondering, what is the network layer?

Don’t worry, we’ll talk about these undelivered transactions in a moment and why they are the main cause of the current Solana congestion. Before we do that, let’s focus on failed trades because it’s important to understand why failed trades are not the main problem.

If you look closely, you may be surprised to find,Only about 8% of these failed transactions come from real users, the rest are cases of failed arbitrage transactions performed by on-chain bots: arbitrageurs will flood Solana with spam transactions because sending spam transactions compares with the rewards from successful arbitrage The cost is negligible.

For example, they could send spam transactions to Solana multiple times a day,This would cost them a few hundred dollars (because Solana’s fees are low), and they could make up to $100,000 in profit just by completing one transaction.

Therefore, it is important to note that these failed transactions do not mean that there is a problem with Solana’s activity - the Solana network is running as expected, so these failed transactions are simply the result of the bots’ transaction conditions not being met, and It is not the main reason for the current poor user experience of Solana.

In fact,Solana’s deal failure rate has remained around 50% since November.If you look back at the failure vs. success chart I laid out above, you’ll see that it was much the same before.

Let us now discuss the main cause of Solana congestion in the past few days - “undelivered transactions”. As mentioned earlier, these transactions failed to reach the “block leader” and were blocked due to problems at the network layer. thrown away.

The network layer is the communication layer of the Internet and is used to send data packets between different connections, such as: TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), UDP (User Datagram Protocol), QUIC (designed by Google), etc.

And Solana just recently upgraded QUIC as its network layer,It helps establish a connection between the user and the “block leader”, and since Solana has continuous block production and no mempool, losing the connection will mean that transactions will not be written to the block.

QUIC enables “block leaders” to cut off connections or rate limit certain users based on specific criteria, so “block leaders” can now drop certain connections when demand on the chain is high, i.e. this The new architecture prevents Solana from stalling when network activity increases—the network may be very congested at this time, but at least it won’t stop.

So you might ask, if everything in QUIC was so well designed, why is Solana so bad now?

So the problem is that even though the “block leader” can now restrict certain connections, the logic of exactly “which connections to restrict” is poorly implemented and flawed.

To understand better, let’s imagine that if under normal circumstances each “block leader” has X connections to talk to, then during peak activity, the “block leader” will start receiving 10- 100x the number of connection requests…

At this time, the “block leader” can choose to abandon certain connections, but the problem is that these connections are not currently discarded according to a set of established criteria (such as discarding all connections with a cost lower than X), but are randomly discarded. …..

So essentially, for your transactions to be included, you have to send more spam transactions than others, and since there are multiple bots sending connection requests to the network, it becomes increasingly difficult for the average user to establish a connection and complete transactions.

That’s the gist of the main issue, teams like Firedancer, Anza, Solana, etc. are working hard to fix the network layer, these patches are rolling out, some major patches are said to be rolling out in the coming weeks.

Will this solve the problem? Will Solana take off again? Not exactly,As a result, there will be more in the futureA long way to go for three reasons:

There’s no guarantee how effective the current fix will be in preventing Solana’s next congestion problem, and we won’t know until it’s actually implemented;

Jump Crypto’s Firedancer may indeed solve these problems, but it won’t be released until the end of the year;

The network spam problem, that is, Solana’s transaction economics, has many problems and cannot prevent malicious users from sending spam.

Disclaimer：

1. This article is reprinted from [加密论道], All copyrights belong to the original author [思维]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
2. Liability Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute any investment advice.
3. Translations of the article into other languages are done by the Gate Learn team. Unless mentioned, copying, distributing, or plagiarizing the translated articles is prohibited.