Solana, the energy-efficient ecosystem, announced it will implement fee prioritization soon to combat its network congestion issues.
Yesterday, May 3, Solana announced in the beta outage report that fees are coming to Solana, giving users the ability to specify a random additional fee to be collected on the execution of a transaction and its inclusion in a block, with additional fees being treated identically to the base fee today.
Solana operates on a first-come, first-served basis, with low transaction fees due to its larger block size and high block time. Human-programmed bots are currently exploiting these two to bug the network by performing various tasks on the network.
Since January, Solana has experienced intermittent congestion due to bot activity targeting NFT mints. On April 30, Solana experienced a 7-hour power outage due to bots overwhelming the network with four million transactions per second, which overloaded the blockchain proof of stake. As a result of the massive number of transactions carried out by the Bots, the Solana Mainnet Beta cluster ceased producing blocks due to stalled consensus.
The consensus stalled because validators ran out of memory and memory crashed due to insufficient votes landing to finalize earlier blocks, preventing abandoned fork cleanup.
Furthermore, the number of forks validators were required to evaluate exceeded their capacity. The bots that caused the April 30 outage were programmed to win a new NFT that was being minted using the popular Candy Machine program.
Solana will implement a prioritization fee that will only affect the ability to write specific states to avoid future network congestion. Transactions that pay high fees but cannot fit into a particular block due to reaching the maximum limits of writing to an account will be spilled and scheduled for the next block. Still, other transactions which interact with other accounts can be added to the same block, even if they pay lower fees. Fee prioritization will be included in the Solana v1.11 release.
Furthermore, Solana also plans to abandon the first-come, first-served model, reimplement Solana core protocols on top of QUIC, and allow users to specify an additional fee to prioritize their transactions on execution and inclusion in a block to ensure the stability and resilience of its network.
