Causes of increased Solana non-voting transaction failures

Determine the exact causes of the observed decrease in the success rate of non-voting transactions on the Solana mainnet across the analyzed historical periods under Solana’s read-write aware execution model, specifically assessing whether the failures are attributable to network congestion, inaccuracies or staleness in client-declared read/write account sets between submission and validator execution, or other identifiable factors.

Background

The paper analyzes 1,000 non-empty Solana blocks across three historical periods and reports that the success rate of non-voting transactions declines from approximately 85.32% in the old period to 54.50% in the recent period. The authors hypothesize potential drivers such as network congestion and inaccuracies in client-specified read/write sets but do not determine the precise causes.

Because Solana’s execution model relies on client-declared read/write sets for scheduling, staleness or inaccuracy in these specifications—as well as validator-side contention under high load—could lead to failures. The authors explicitly note that identifying the exact reasons behind the increased failure rates requires additional analysis beyond the scope of their paper.