Solana network overwhelmed by bot spams, witnessing a surge in unsuccessful transactions
The Solana network has been greatly affected by the rising popularity of memecoins, as it experienced a staggering 75% failure rate for transactions on April 4. Dune Analytics data revealed that a significant number of non-vote transactions on the network had failed, marking the highest failure rate ever recorded. Non-vote transactions refer to SOL transactions on the Solana network. This surge in failed transactions has garnered criticism from the cryptocurrency community, with users expressing dissatisfaction with the poor user experience.
Over the past few months, memecoins on the Solana network have become a prominent topic of discussion. Numerous meme coin projects have been launched on the network, some of which have generated substantial gains. As a result, trading bots have been deployed on the network to facilitate arbitrage trades. However, when these arbitrage opportunities are nonexistent, the trades fail.
Helis CEO Mert Mumtaz referred to these failed transactions as “bot spam” and stated that they constituted the majority of failures on the Solana network. He explained that this wasn’t a major issue for users since their wallets would simulate the transaction and notify them in advance if it wouldn’t work. According to Mert, Dune’s failed transactions chart is not the best way to assess the impact on users as most users don’t even reach that stage. He emphasized that spam activity occurs before the scheduling process, where bots have the advantage over humans, resulting in dropped user transactions.
Mert also pointed out that increasing transaction priority fees wouldn’t help users trying to execute transactions at the moment because the spam activity occurs before the scheduling process. He believed that “networking patches” are needed, and although the upcoming 1.18 Solana upgrade may not fully resolve the issue, it is a step in the right direction.
At the time of writing, SOL had experienced a more than 7% decrease in value over the past 24 hours, reflecting a bearish sentiment towards the token. In addition to this downturn, a Solana-based meme coin project allegedly scammed users out of $906,000 worth of SOL tokens, further exacerbating the situation.
