6 [SOL] Solana Fees
Solana Transaction Fees
Each transaction sent through the network, to be processed by the current leader validation-client and confirmed as a global state transaction, contains a transaction fee. Transaction fees offer many benefits in the Solana economic design, for example they:
- provide unit compensation to the validator network for the CPU/GPU resources necessary to process the state transaction,
- reduce network spam by introducing real cost to transactions, and provide potential long-term economic stability of the network through a protocol-captured - minimum fee amount per transaction, as described below.
> NOTE: This analysis only looked at the time period beginning January 2022.
Insights
- About 300-350 SOL is being spent on gas fees daily
- Since January 2022, about 10K SOL has been spent on gas fees. At today's (Feb 4, 2022) SOL price, that equates to about $1,169,200 USD.
How are Solana fees set
Transaction fees are set by the network cluster based on recent historical throughput, see Congestion Driven Fees. This minimum portion of each transaction fee can be dynamically adjusted depending on historical signatures-per-slot. In this way, the protocol can use the minimum fee to target a desired hardware utilization. By monitoring a protocol specified signatures-per-slot with respect to a desired, target usage amount, the minimum fee can be raised/lowered which should, in turn, lower/raise the actual signature-per-slot per block until it reaches the target amount. This adjustment process can be thought of as similar to the difficulty adjustment algorithm in the Bitcoin protocol, however in this case it is adjusting the minimum transaction fee to guide the transaction processing hardware usage to a desired level.
As we can see, in the last month we haven't seen any spikes. The daily average for the gas fees has been fairly consistent around 5000 lamports. Note that 1 Lamport = 0.000000001 SOL. A lamport is fractional SOL named in honor of Solana's biggest technical influence, Leslie Lamport.