Solana’s Spam Problems Persist Despite Tech Improvements, MEV Researchers Say
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Despite efforts by Solana developers to discourage spammy transactions that could threaten to bog down the network, a majority of the network’s compute is still being wasted on failed trades, according to an analysis by crypto infrastructure company Jito Labs.
Jito found that arbitrage transactions used 60% of the overall compute space during a recent epoch. This is roughly two-and-a-half days on Solana. These transactions were attempts by bots to win slim margins on competitive trades – and 98% of their attempts failed.
According to Jito Foundation’s blog, the result is wasted network blockspace and capital burned for no reason other than losing trades. It blames this on the way Solana’s infrastructure handles submitted transactions: give priority to the first in line. Arbitrage bots are encouraged to submit duplicate transactions in order to win.
Recent changes to Solana’s backend – particularly the introduction of priority fees and local fee markets – have changed the economics around spamming; and yet spam transactions will persist as long as MEV (maximal extractable value) opportunities remain, according to Analyse Validator service Chorus One
MEV is a term that refers to trading strategies that allow traders to extract as much cryptocurrency as possible from a particular blockchain network. This typically involves anticipating future transactions and then using this advanced information for profitable trades.
The two most popular strategies are winning arbitrage trades or fulfilling liquidation order. On Ethereum, where MEV is a cottage industry, the network’s slower architecture and emphasis on fees combats spam transactions much more than Solana’s,
Jito Foundation is developing a specialty client to the Solana Network that optimizes MEV, according to the pseudonymous Buffalu (CEO of Jito Labs), which also contributes to this work.