Key Points
- The Solana network experienced a 75% failure rate in transactions on April 4, largely due to memecoins.
- The rise in memecoins and trading bots has led to criticism and poor user experience on the Solana network.
The Solana network has been hit hard by the rising popularity of memecoins, with 75% of its transactions failing on April 4.
Data from Dune Analytics reveals that a large portion of the failed transactions were “non-vote” transactions, the highest failure rate recorded to date.
Memecoins and Solana
Memecoins on the Solana network have been a hot topic in recent months. A plethora of new meme coin projects have been launched on the network since the beginning of the year, some of which have seen significant gains.
The increase in meme coin prices has led to the deployment of trading bots on the network. These bots attempt to carry out arbitrage trades, which fail when no arbitrage opportunities exist.
Bot Spam and User Experience
Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helis, has identified these failed transactions as “bot spam”, constituting the majority of the failed transactions on Solana.
According to Mumtaz, this is not typically a significant issue for users as their wallets simulate the transaction and notify them of any potential failure beforehand.
However, he also noted that Dune’s failed transactions chart is not an accurate measure of the impact on users on the Solana network. Most of the spam activity on the network occurs before the scheduling process, which is an operational algorithm that determines the order of transaction processing.
Bots, being faster than humans at spamming, often result in user transactions being dropped. Mumtaz also pointed out that since spam activity occurs before the scheduling process, increasing transaction priority fees would not benefit users trying to execute transactions.
The Helis CEO stated that networking patches are needed and are expected to be rolled out soon. However, he also mentioned that the upcoming 1.18 Solana upgrade might not fully address this issue.
At the time of this report, SOL’s value had dropped by more than 7% in the last 24 hours as the overall sentiment towards the token became bearish. In addition to this, a Solana-based meme coin project has allegedly scammed users out of $906,000 worth of SOL tokens, contributing to the downturn.
