What is Solana?

Solana is an open source, high-performance, permissionless blockchain.

In the following analysis I want to verify, if the fees on Solana are as constant as expected.

Transaction fees

Every transaction in the Solana network contains a fee. The amount of the transaction fees are set by the network cluster based on recent historical throughput. These fees are called Deterministic Transaction Fees.

That means, transactions currently include a fee field that indicates the maximum fee field a slot leader is permitted to charge to process a transaction. The cluster, on the other hand, agrees on a minimum fee. If the network is congested, the slot leader may prioritize the transactions offering higher fees. That means the client won't know how much was collected until the transaction is confirmed by the cluster and the remaining balance is checked. It smells of exactly what we dislike about Ethereum's "gas", non-determinism.

(Source: https://docs.solana.com/transaction_fees & https://docs.solana.com/implemented-proposals/transaction-fees#congestion-driven-fees)

How high are those fees?

Every transaction has a different amount of transaction fees. To make it easier and more comparable we will calculate the average transaction fee per transaction per day.

(Info: Only for succeeded transactions!)

Looking at the bar chart above, we can see that the average fees are not consistent. We had a spike on the 7th and two on the 21st and 22nd of January. Knowing this, one question could be answer with: Solana transaction fees are not consistent, there are spikes some times! But let's not forget to say, that fees on Solana network are pretty cheap, compared to ETH for example.

Checking the 'Total fees per day' chart, shows, that total fees per day are most of the time consistent over around 200, only a few days are far below. Those days are the same as the ones where the average fee spiked!

What happened at those days?

Let's check the number of transactions for these days. Maybe we see some anomalies on these days.

Conclusion

After googling "Solana downtimes" I found a lot of news like these:

• 'The "Ethereum killer" Solana has gone down once again, for the fourth time in the last 12 months, WuBlockchain reports.'
• 'Solana Suffers Yet Another Major Outage'
• 'Why Does Solana Network Go Down So Often?'
• ...

It looks like Solana has still a big problem to solve, to be more stable and secure in the new future.

Even though the days with few fees do not coincide 100% with the days of failures, it is reasonable to assume that this is the cause. The second thing i notice is that on the days with few transactions, the fee per transaction is more expensive. I.e. the more transactions per day, the cheaper the transactions.

The chart above shows, that we have very less transactions on 7th, 21st and 22nd of January as suspected. So it looks like we had some kind of downtimes with the Solana network.