According to a recent report by The Block, Solana's network has been experiencing congestion issues, causing delays in transaction processing and a significant number of transactions to be dropped. The issue has been attributed to an increase in spam transactions and a surge in memecoin activity on the network.

Phantom wallet app users and other apps on Solana have reported delays in transaction processing, advising users to be patient as their transactions are processed. The congestion has been caused by bots attempting to prioritize their activities over regular users, resulting in impeded access for many users.

The first quarter of 2024 saw a significant increase in memecoin activity on the Solana blockchain, with a record number of new tokens appearing on Solana DEXs. The influx of memecoin activity has been driven by the network's affordable transaction fees, attracting new and retail users. However, the spam transactions have emerged as a bottleneck for the network.

Matt Sorg, a tech and product leader at the Solana Foundation, compared Solana's architecture to the internet's infrastructure. In Solana's setup, individual validators process transactions without a mempool, similar to how IP endpoints and servers operate on the internet. The network dispatches transactions directly to block leaders, bypassing any staging model or mempool where transactions might wait before being added to the chain.

Sorg suggested that an overload of spam transactions could overwhelm this system, potentially resulting in many transactions being dropped. He stated that there is an issue with the process on Solana, resulting in a user not having a reliable way to get transactions included into blocks. The systems in place for fees and stake-weighted transactions are not being reached.

In response to these challenges, the Solana development team is working on effective solutions, and software patches are being developed to address the issue. According to co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, the patches will take some time to implement.