Analysis shows how Solana blockchain processes blocks and transactions
Analyzing Solana's Blocks and Transactions
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingCryptography and Security
Summary
Solana is a popular blockchain that runs many smart contracts called dApps. The authors studied a million recent Solana blocks to see how big blocks are, how long transactions take, and which programs are used. They also looked at how transactions might clash or work together, which affects how many can run in parallel. This helps understand what makes Solana fast and efficient.
What this means in practice
- •For blockchain developers: Optimize smart contract design on Solana using detailed data on transaction conflicts and execution times per block.
- •For blockchain platform architects: Improve blockchain throughput by analyzing Solana’s block size and conflict patterns to enhance parallel transaction processing.
Authors
Yaron Hay, Dvir David Biton, Roy Friedman
Abstract
Solana is one of the most popular blockchains, and is arguably the most widely used blockchain for smart contracts, also known as dApps. Understanding the types of smart contracts that are being executed by Solana and their interplay is therefore highly beneficial both for designers of modern blockchains and developers of smart contracts. To that end, in this paper we analyze a million recent Solana blocks. We report statistics about the size of blocks (number of transactions per block), execution time units for individual transactions and fees, and invoked Solana programs. Further, based on the declared readset and writeset of each transaction, as mandated by Solana, we analyze the conflicts and corresponding conflict graphs arising within each block. These latter statistics are important to understand the potential for parallelism in the network, which is one of the main claimed benefits of Solana. The data and code are available in open source.