Analyzing Solana's Blocks and Transactions

2026-09-28

AI Summary

This study addresses the practical bottlenecks in parallel execution of Solana smart contracts by conducting, for the first time, a large-scale quantitative analysis across millions of blocks. Methodologically, it characterizes transaction sizes, fees, and program invocation patterns, while constructing conflict graph models based on read-write sets to systematically evaluate the network's parallel processing potential. The primary contributions include revealing the transaction conflict structures and practical constraints that limit parallel performance in Solana, thereby providing empirical evidence for blockchain architecture optimization. Furthermore, all analytical code and datasets are open-sourced to facilitate subsequent research and development within the community.

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.

Problem

• Solana
• blockchain analysis
• smart contracts
• transaction conflicts
• parallelism

Innovation

• Solana
• Conflict Graphs
• Parallelism
• Readset and Writeset
• Blockchain Analysis