Analyzing Solana's Blocks and Transactions

Solana is one of the most popular blockchains, and is arguably the most widely used blockchain for smart contracts, also known as dApps. Understanding the types of smart contracts that are being executed by Solana and their interplay is therefore highly beneficial both for designers of modern blockchains and developers of smart contracts. To that end, in this paper we analyze a million recent Solana blocks. We report statistics about the size of blocks (number of transactions per block), execution time units for individual transactions and fees, and invoked Solana programs. Further, based on the declared readset and writeset of each transaction, as mandated by Solana, we analyze the conflicts and corresponding conflict graphs arising within each block. These latter statistics are important to understand the potential for parallelism in the network, which is one of the main claimed benefits of Solana. The data and code are available in open source.