Solana is about to launch a new fee prioritization model to effectively offset the impact of in-demand apps and services, as well as other significant technology updates.
Solana’s developers have proposed switching from UDP to QUIC, as well as stake-weighted transaction processing and a fee-based transaction priority.
This is owing to the network’s seventh outage last month, which resulted in a downtime of more than seven hours. Following the network meltdown blamed on bots (or users’ automated programs) overwhelming an NFT mint, the developer team has produced an outage report along with three major mitigating efforts to make the network more stable. According to the report, the new model will use “neighborhood fees” that will have no influence on the overall network.
Three important mitigating procedures are being implemented to make the Solana network more resilient to such congestion concerns, per the official report. The first important stage is to switch from the present user datagram protocol (UDP) to the Google-developed fast UDP internet connection protocol (QUIC). QUIC provides fast asynchronous communication similar to UDP, but with sessions and flow control similar to TCP.
The incorporation of stake-weighted transaction processing, rather than the current first-come-first-served model, is the second critical stage. Stake-weighted transaction processing combined with QUIC, according to the developers, would be more robust.
The third mitigation step is to implement “fee execution priority,” in which customers might pay an additional cost in addition to the standard fee. The fee prioritization has been set for the v1.11 release.
Gas fees can be extremely expensive, ranging in the hundreds or even thousands of dollars, according to a similar model on Ethereum. However, unlike Ethereum, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko claims that the model will not punish users with high fees across the entire network.
Following the initial release of the v1.10.25 Solana network update, Yakovenko outlined how the new price prioritization mechanism works in a Twitter thread this week.
In Yakovenko’s description, each decentralized app (dapp) functions as a single switch. “A specific NFT auction, or specific Serum market, or Orca AMM pool is one switch,” he added. Fees are used to prioritize transactions within a single app or protocol, rather than across the entire network.
Validators are actively implementing the upgrade, and once 95 percent of the decentralized network has been updated, validators will be able to turn on the feature. It may take some more iteration, and it could be a few weeks before people start seeing the additional fees.