Solana stands out in the web3 industry with its exceptional performance, capable of continuing to generate blocks under massive workloads. However, its infrastructure urgently needs upgrades, and new ideas can be introduced in its building methods. The launch of the $TRUMP and $MELANIA tokens clearly illustrates this.

The tweet about $TRUMP released by the new U.S. President Donald Trump had a tremendous impact on the Solana ecosystem, bringing a surge of users and on-chain activity. Solana's daily trading volume set new records, with DEX trading volume reaching $27 billion. The on-chain trading volume of the Solana ecosystem alone is close to 1/10 of the entire Nasdaq's daily trading volume!

At the same time, this remarkable achievement also led to daily total gas fees reaching new highs, several times higher than the previous historical record! On January 19, 2025, users paid approximately $35 million in transaction fees, compared to $13 million on November 21, 2024. Meanwhile, the earnings of validators increased from $6.9 million to $17.7 million.

However, the gas fees being several times higher than normal does not equate to a smooth user experience, as on-chain transactions experienced anomalies: despite the record-breaking and stable generation of blocks, the number of on-chain transactions actually declined. Notably, Solana's congestion led to a lower-than-normal utilization of computational units (CUs) in blocks. This can be seen in block 315110102, which contained an unusually small number of unvoted transactions (15 transactions, one of which was rejected). Researcher @_weidai from @1kxnetwork proposed a possible reason: Solana has a bottleneck in network bandwidth, especially at the block proposer entry point.

The infrastructure failure of @Jito_labs was also one of the causes of this network congestion. After the launch of the $MELANIA token, the sending of Jito transactions was interrupted, and non-priority transactions effectively came to a halt. Due to the load reaching unprecedented levels, Jito's block engine API experienced significant failures, disrupting multiple services and Jito transaction submissions. (Most Solana nodes use Jito's client)

According to observations by @smyyyguy, the following occurred on the Solana chain:

• The median priority fee surged by 5000 times
• The number of transactions decreased by 66% (rollback transactions remained unchanged)
• The computational units (CUs) per block decreased by 50%

Binance and #Coinbase users also encountered issues. According to data from @solscanofficial, transactions from Coinbase were rejected due to the inability to automatically increase transaction fees, and Coinbase also paused user withdrawals for a period. Even after several hours, Coinbase still faced withdrawal issues.

phantom, as the most popular wallet, also crashed under the flood of users and transactions, experiencing 8 million requests per minute, a staggering number! The enormous load on Phantom's infrastructure also manifested in some users being unable to update their balances or even load the wallet interface.

The result is that the Solana blockchain operates normally, but ordinary users cannot use it. During the most difficult times, the number of rejected non-voting transactions in blocks reached 40%-60%, similar to the situation in the spring of 2024. As we mentioned earlier, during the events of January 19-20, 2025, despite numerous user complaints, on-chain data did not show a significant number of failed congestions. This may be related to the decrease in computational units (CUs) within blocks.

Additionally, it is worth noting the decrease in the number of block signers. This indicates that the block distribution and signing process were also affected. This may have exacerbated the anomaly of relatively few congestion occurrences in the chart.

The reasons for transaction rejections are varied: sometimes transactions fail to enter blocks due to infrastructure overload; sometimes it is because transactions cannot keep up with price changes; and some transactions are rejected due to long waiting times—this is one of Solana's speed characteristics, namely the lack of a memory pool (mempool).

This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. If a transaction has a lower priority due to lower fees, it will not wait as it would on an EVM-based chain, but will be rejected in less than a minute.

Subsequently, the cost of "priority" transactions has increased significantly—from 0.2 SOL to 2 SOL ($50 to $540). Considering that this has been a persistent situation rather than a short-term phenomenon, Solana's fees are indeed outrageous. For example, you can see here that all transfer transactions with fees of 0.03-0.04 SOL ($7-10) are being rejected, causing losses to users.

The Lollipop development team had noticed the surge in priority transactions on Solana earlier, prompting us to think about how to improve the reliability of users and protocols. Although the chain can operate normally and generate blocks, as @0xMert_ said, "In 2021-2022, a 1% load was enough to stop the chain from generating any blocks."

However, the widespread existence of transaction congestion and priority transactions prevents users from enjoying a convenient and low-cost transaction experience. Moreover, protocols may struggle to cope with sudden bandwidth peaks and economic changes—this could lead to unexpected temporary losses for all parties in scenarios such as gaming, trading, and payments.

Therefore, it is important not only for Solana to be decentralized but also to allocate and balance loads at critical moments—imagine if Solana became a global payment chain, covering all other areas, as part of a global payment infrastructure (inspired by @calilyliu's vision).

This means a dramatic increase in users and transaction volume. Consider the events that occurred from January 19-20, 2025; if they became a permanent daily occurrence, it would benefit no one.

The way Solana is organized means that the more validators there are, the more transactions and information must be processed and handled. Therefore, it is necessary to increase not just the number of validators. Enterprise solutions often have multiple nodes, especially when using TEE, and there is a reason for this—due to the lack of decentralization, the speed is not fast. Therefore, to maintain decentralization and censorship resistance, we need a way to provide load balancing and clustering without fragmenting the ecosystem itself.

For example, if you want to buy a bottle of water for $1.50 using your Solana account, but the transaction fails to submit properly. To make the transaction successful, you might need to pay $0.50 or more. This is unsustainable.

However, what if the processing was done on a network expansion (NE) owned by a payment provider? Users pay for shopping, and each transaction only costs $0.0001. If Solana had not experienced overload and rising transaction fees, the settlement and deduction from the user's Solana account balance would be completed immediately. If there is a surge in transaction activity, settlements for different accounts could occur later, avoiding unnecessary economic burdens while ensuring a good user experience.

Additionally, suppose that based on load variations across different time zones, protocols deployed on the network expansion (NE) can obtain the necessary computing power in the correct geographical areas and scale through decentralized RPC. If necessary, other modules can also be connected to add extra functionalities or routing. Other NEs will perform their domain-specific tasks, all happening on Solana.

This would elevate Solana to new heights of development, becoming a truly global blockchain that offers impressive stability while maintaining decentralization. By appropriately distributing functions, balancing loads, and enhancing stability through Lollipop, the enormous potential of Solana's monolithic infrastructure will be unleashed.

Let’s make Solana great again!