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

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. We find that transaction failure rates on Solana exhibit recurring daily patterns, and demonstrate a strong positive correlation with the volume of failed transactions, with bots on Solana experiencing a high transaction failure rate of 58.43%. We identify ten distinct error types in the error logs of failed transactions, with price or profit not met and invalid status errors accounting for 67.18% of all failed transactions. AMMs primarily experience invalid status errors among failed transactions, while DEX aggregators are more commonly affected by price or profit not met errors. Among transaction initiators, bots encounter a broader range of errors due to their high-frequency trading and complex interactions with smart contracts. In contrast, human users experience a more limited range of errors. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations to mitigate transaction failures on Solana and outline future research directions.