What is Solana?

Solana is a blockchain platform designed to host decentralized, scalable applications. Founded in 2017, Solana is an open-source project currently run by Solana Foundation based in Geneva, while the blockchain was built by San Francisco-based Solana Labs.1 Solana is much faster in terms of the number of transactions it can process and has significantly lower transaction fees compared to rival blockchains like Ethereum.

Question:

Create a dashboard displaying Solana network performance over time. How has the network performed over the past month compared to the rest of the year? Has transaction per second and success rates of transactions gone up recently? Is this because of less botting or fewer users, or new improvements from the Solana engineers? What wallets and programs have paid the most in fees for failed transactions?

Metrics:

1. Total Monthly Successful vs Failed Transactions
2. Percent of Total Monthly Transactions Which Succeeded or Failed
3. Average Transactions per Second Daily
4. Top 10 Wallets In Terms of Fees Paid for Failed Transactions
5. Top 10 Programs In Terms of Fees Paid for Failed Transactions

Analysis:

The total number of transactions was decreasing month over month until around April of 2022 when it began to trend back upwards again, as the number of transaction increased the number of failed transactions also increased greatly. As you can see the months that have the most overall transactions also are the months that clearly have the largest amount of failed transactions. Although if we move onto the graph on the right we can see that although the number of failed transactions might change month to month the percentage of failed transactions tends to stay relatively consistent. Although if we look at recent months the percent of failed transactions tends to be in the range of nearly 30% and above while earlier in the year the percent of failed transactions tended to be below 25% on most months. It appears that the percent of failed transactions is larger now than it used to be and with the trend that is currently going on there is no knowing whether it will continue or not.

Analysis:

If we look at the first graph in this section we can see the average transaction speed per second on a daily basis as you can see the amount of transactions per second were much larger in the beginning of the year before they began to trend downwards all the way to around April of 2022, after that though they began to trending upwards where they are still trending upwards into the current day sitting at around 550-600 transactions per second daily, but they are still down from previous highs earlier in the year of 800+. The sudden upward trend in transaction speed over this time period likely explains why the number of failed transactions has increased as it has changed rather fast. If we move onto the bottom two metric we can see both the top wallets and the top programs who lost money in fees paid for failed transactions. the largest wallet that lost money for these transactions lost over 85k Sol in these transactions, the other wallets lost similar amounts to this one as well. If we look at the top programs who lost money to failed transactions we can see that they have not even lost close to as much with FTX losing the most by far, and they have only lost 65 Sol in transactions which is weird how individual wallets were able to lose so much while these large programs lost so little in comparison.

Conclusion:

1. The percentage of Failed transactions currently are up from where they were a year ago by a significant amount.
2. The transactions per second on Solana have been trending upwards over the last couple months although they have not returned to the previous highs of last year.
3. a handful of wallets have lost a large amount in failed transaction fees while large programs seem to have not lost even a fraction of the amount in these failed fees.