The creator of the phantom wallet, Brian Friel, admits that priority fees are inefficient and notes that Solana still has network congestion problems.
The developer relations manager at Phantom, Brian Friel, acknowledged in a recent X post that the Solana meme coin frenzy has resulted in a “large amount of congestion,” rendering the priority fee system meaningless for many users.
Friel encouraged customers who have previously experienced issues with transactions on Phantom to try again, promising a better experience “with the next network release in April.” According to Brian Friel:
“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.”
Phantom has implemented automatic priority fees on all transactions, but Friel stressed that there is no magic bullet for persistent network issues. Instead, the team must work to tackle bot spam in addition to the priority fee scheme.
Due to the increase in on-chain activity, Phantom is not the only Solana-centric product experiencing difficulties; the Ledger support team has previously reported possible network or transaction issues due to congestion.
The Solana ecosystem has experienced exponential expansion in recent times, as evidenced by record highs in both the volume of decentralized exchange trading and the total value of assets locked in decentralized financial protocols. Low network costs and the ubiquity of meme coins like Dogwifhat (WIF), Bonk (BONK), and Book of Meme (BOME) are credited for this spike.
