High Failure Rate on Solana Due to Bot Spam

The Solana network is facing a major issue with up to 75% of transactions failing during execution, significantly impacting user experience.

According to data compiled by Dune Analytics, Solana has witnessed up to 75% of "non-vote" transactions—transactions involving token transfers, not staking or governance—failing within the past 24 hours, marking the highest recorded failure rate.

Similar incidents occurred at the end of March, with Coin68 previously reporting a 50% failure rate in non-vote transactions. The Solana-based liquid staking project, Jito, had to halt mempool functionality in early March to combat bot front-running of users.

The success (green) and failure (red) rates of non-vote transactions on Solana. Source: @scarn_eth on Dune Analytics (04/05/2024)

On social media platform X (Twitter), many cryptocurrency users have also expressed frustration over their inability to execute token transfers. Some opinions suggest that unless Solana can promptly address this issue, the project may struggle to achieve mainstream blockchain adoption as previously touted.

However, in a post dated April 5th, Helius project CEO 0xMert—known as one of Solana's staunchest advocates on Twitter—attributed a majority of the recent 75% failure rate in non-vote transactions to bot spam.

The reason behind many transactions failing is Solana's current lack of an effective bot spam prevention mechanism. However, the upcoming Solana 1.18 release is expected to address this issue.

Diagram simplifying the bot spam issue on Solana. Source: @0xBreadguy on Twitter

At the end of March, 0xMert also provided a clear explanation of the spam issue, noting that bots are attempting to exploit price discrepancies on Solana. According to the developer, the high number of failed transactions is due to bots submitting invalid requests to the Solana blockchain, which are accepted and subsequently rejected by the system. Therefore, it's inaccurate to say that Solana is facing transaction processing issues.

Solana has continued to experience increased usage demand recently due to the memecoin wave and large-scale airdrops, the latest being Wormhole's W token.

During Solana's troubles, attention has turned to a new video produced by the project's Superteam community, criticizing Ethereum's shortcomings while highlighting Solana's advantages in transaction fees and speed. The video also calls for developers and development teams to transition from ETH to this blockchain.