Why Does My Transaction Fail? A First Look at Failed Transactions on the Solana Blockchain

2025-04-25

AI Summary

This study systematically investigates the causes and impacts of transaction failures on the Solana blockchain. Addressing the challenges of bot-driven spam and network congestion, we construct a fine-grained error attribution framework using over 1.5 billion failed transactions and 72 million blocks—the first to combine semantic clustering of error logs with spatiotemporal pattern mining. We find that bots account for over 68% of failures; the top ten error types—including *BlockhashExpired* and *InsufficientFunds*—dominate failure occurrences, while AMM-related operations exhibit elevated risk. Quantitative comparisons between successful and failed transactions reveal significant differences in initiator behavior, fee distribution, and temporal characteristics. Our work fills a critical empirical gap in Solana failure analysis and proposes actionable optimizations: protocol-level enhancements (e.g., dynamic fee mechanisms) and wallet-layer improvements (e.g., pre-execution validation).

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Distributed Problem Solving
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Causality
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Robustness and generalizability of Web mining methods
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrencies
• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers

Abstract

Solana is an emerging blockchain platform, recognized for its high throughput and low transaction costs, positioning it as a preferred infrastructure for Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and other Web 3.0 applications. In the Solana ecosystem, transaction initiators submit various instructions to interact with a diverse range of Solana smart contracts, among which are decentralized exchanges (DEXs) that utilize automated market makers (AMMs), allowing users to trade cryptocurrencies directly on the blockchain without the need for intermediaries. Despite the high throughput and low transaction costs of Solana, the advantages have exposed Solana to bot spamming for financial exploitation, resulting in the prevalence of failed transactions and network congestion. Prior work on Solana has mainly focused on the evaluation of the performance of the Solana blockchain, particularly scalability and transaction throughput, as well as on the improvement of smart contract security, leaving a gap in understanding the characteristics and implications of failed transactions on Solana. To address this gap, we conducted a large-scale empirical study of failed transactions on Solana, using a curated dataset of over 1.5 billion failed transactions across more than 72 million blocks. Specifically, we first characterized the failed transactions in terms of their initiators, failure-triggering programs, and temporal patterns, and compared their block positions and transaction costs with those of successful transactions. We then categorized the failed transactions by the error messages in their error logs, and investigated how specific programs and transaction initiators are associated with these errors...

Problem

• Analyzes causes of failed transactions on Solana blockchain
• Investigates error patterns in Solana smart contract interactions
• Examines impact of bot spamming on transaction failures

Innovation

• Large-scale empirical study on Solana failed transactions
• Characterization by initiators, programs, temporal patterns
• Categorization by error messages and logs