Phantom wallet developer admits priority fee ineffectiveness
Phantom wallet developer Brian Friel acknowledges priority fee ineffectiveness, signaling ongoing challenges due to Solana facing network congestion.
The meme coin craze on Solana has eventually led to a “large amount of congestion,” which makes priority fee mechanism useless for some users, Brian Friel, developer relations manager at Phantom, admitted in a recent X post. Addressing users who encountered difficulties with transactions on Phantom earlier, Friel urged them to retry, assuring them of a smoother experience “with the next network release in April.”
“Priority fees are not the cure for this issue. With the current issues the network is facing, priority fees are not working as expected and adding a higher fee does not result in improved success rates.”
Brian Friel
Despite Phantom’s implementation of automatic priority fees on all transactions, Friel emphasized there’s no silver bullet to ongoing network challenges, emphasizing the team’s efforts to combat spam from bots alongside the priority fee system.
Phantom isn’t the sole Solana-centric product grappling with challenges amid the surge in on-chain activity, as the Ledger support team has previously also noted potential network or transaction errors due to congestion.
The Solana ecosystem has witnessed exponential growth recently, with decentralized exchange trading volume and the total value of assets locked in decentralized finance protocols reaching record highs. This surge is attributed to factors such as low network fees and the popularity of meme coins like Dogwifhat (WIF), Bonk (BONK), and Book of Meme (BOME).
