- Lots of network activity - memecoin trading, defi, arbitrage bots, Ore mining(?) - everyone is trying to submit txns
- Solana nodes are overwhelmed and can't process every tx that gets submitted - txs are dropped. Only a fraction of txs are making it through.
- In order to maximize the chance that a tx gets processed, bots start spamming txs to the network.
- This ends up hurting real users who can't spam at the same rate. It's now less likely that their txs get processed.
It's important to note that this is different from a typical failed transaction. Failed txs usually mean the txs were processed by a validator and didn't succeed due to the state of the chain.
The failures you're seeing now are at the network layer (QUIC is pretty new tech), which needs to be improved.
PS: this chart of failed Solana transactions is unrelated to the dropped tx issue above. These are mostly caused by arbitrage bots (that don't care about state failures) spamming the chain. Most users are failing before they even get to this point lol.