https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00561-x
Research
Solana’s transaction network: analysis, insights, and comparison
Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, 116 Street, T6G 2R3, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Received:
10
February
2025
Accepted:
23
May
2025
Published online:
14
July
2025
Solana is recognized for its innovative Proof of History consensus mechanism, a cryptographic method that enables validators—participants responsible for verifying transactions—to efficiently record and order events without extensive communication, thus supporting high transaction rates. Despite its high-speed transactions capability, low cost transaction fees and significant market presence, it remains relatively underexplored in academic research. To address this gap, this paper uses graph-based modeling to analyze Solana’s transaction network. The analysis reveals several interesting key characteristics, including a high concentration of transactions among central nodes, a prevalence of unidirectional transactions, and a low graph density. Moreover, we observe a significantly higher transaction failure rate (approximately 20% compared to 0.1% on Ethereum) and a substantial proportion of zero-value transfers (around 7.6% versus 0.66% on Ethereum). These findings shed light on underexplored aspects of Solana’s ecosystem and provide insights that could influence future blockchain research and applications. The findings are particularly relevant for understanding behavior of blockchains with high transaction rates, and optimizing blockchain scalability and security.
Key words: Blockchain / Solana / Transaction graph
© The Author(s) 2025
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.