Solana Mempools = Corrupt Emergency Room Nurses (It’ll Make Sense When You Read It)

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Picture this…

You’re traveling and break your arm (not great), so you go to the emergency room (expensive, yes — but that’s what insurance is for).

You arrive and are quickly told the wait time is ~2hrs (very doable).

• 2hrs pass…and nothing (ok, this is an emergency room after all — they’ll get to you eventually)

• 4hrs pass (“man, they must be slammed” — you make eye contact with the nurse at the front desk — she smiles as if to say “I haven’t forgotten you”)

• 8hrs pass (“how injured do you have to be to see a doctor around here?”)

• 16hrs pass (“Dammit, I’m about to break my other arm just so I can see someone!”)

• 32hrs pass before you realize: the nurse behind the desk is taking bribes from people to jump the line! (Your anger knows no bounds)

That ☝️ right there ☝️ is what’s happening on Solana right now.

Some Solana ‘client’ developers (aka the folks responsible for writing software that lets folks access/transact on the Solana network) have created these things called ‘mempools’ (aka ‘transaction waiting rooms’).

And just like the nurse in the above story, these mempool operators will jump your transaction to the front of the queue if you grease their palms a little.

The problem is:

These fee-based mempools can be manipulated to enable bot attacks.

Plus, in times of heightened activity on the Solana network, everyday users are having slow and clunky experiences, cause they keep getting pushed to the back of the line.

(Which is an issue given Solana’s whole value pitch is essentially “we operate at the speed of light”)

The solution?

Axe the mempools and return to a ‘first in, best dressed’ model.

Which is exactly what Jito — the biggest mempool operator on Solana — has just done.

But it ain’t a perfect solution…

Here’s where it gets a little wack-a-mole-y

Mempools aren’t a standard feature of Solana. Instead, they’re made and operated by third party developers.

The same way Flappy Bird wasn’t developed by the creators of our iOS/Android operating systems — but instead by a third party developer, called Dong Nguyen.

And when Dong removed support for Flappy Bird, others saw an opportunity and started flooding app stores w Flappy Bird copy cats.

(The same thing might happen with mempools on Solana).