Solana's Congestion Issues and Transaction Drops

In early April, Solana faced significant congestion due to a surge in memecoin launches and speculative projects taking advantage of its low fees, leading to slow confirmation times and dropped transactions. Despite a network upgrade on April 15 aimed at reducing this congestion, around 59% of non-vote transactions are still being dropped, an improvement from the 75% drop rate seen in April, but not significantly better.

To understand the current state, I conducted real-time transactions on Solana. While simple transactions like converting Solana into JitoSOL and depositing into a liquidity pool on Raydium were quick and inexpensive, buying a dog-themed memecoin with the BONKbot Telegram trading bot failed multiple times due to network congestion.

Many analysts believe the high drop rate is largely due to arbitrage bots flooding the network. Data from a Dune Analytics query showed that in one week in March, over 92% of failed transactions were from bots making more than 5,000 trades a day. However, this does not conclusively prove that regular users have fewer issues than bots.

Solana Labs has released several patches since April, but co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko noted that a major release requires 30 patches. The community is hopeful for the Firedancer upgrade, designed by Jump Crypto, which is expected to improve network throughput. Yakovenko estimated a 50% chance of Firedancer reaching the mainnet before the Solana Breakpoint event in September.

### Drift Protocol's Airdrop Controversy

In April 2024, Drift Protocol announced an airdrop for its most active users. However, it became clear that some users were engaging in Sybil attacks, creating multiple accounts to falsely appear active. Drift partnered with Allium to identify and mitigate these malicious accounts, redistributing their rewards to genuine participants.

This move led to frustration among some users who claimed they were wrongly flagged as Sybil attackers. Drift Protocol responded by setting up an appeal page to review and potentially restore allocations for those wrongly accused.

Drift Protocol's experience highlights the challenges of ensuring fairness in token distributions and balancing security with user trust. It also underscores the need for constant adaptation to counter evolving tactics from bad actors.