Solana’s new gas fee will not make the entire network expensive, claims co-founder

Solana, an advanced blockchain designed for scaling decentralised applications, is set to introduce a new fee prioritisation model which is made to diminish the impact of in-demand apps and services alongside other new tech upgrades.

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko said that the model would not charge high fees across the entire network, unlike Ethereum.

Solana is a public blockchain protocol that seeks to offer faster transactions at significantly lesser fees than Ethereum, one of the most popular public blockchain protocols in the world. One of Solana’s key claims is the blockchain’s ability to support a significantly higher volume of transactions than other blockchains such as Ethereum, at any given point in time.

Solana Labs showed the first details of the latest fee implementation last month in a report, following the network crash as bots thronging an NFT mint.

According to the report, the latest model “creates a system akin to ‘neighborhood fees’ instead of ‘global fees.’”

Yakovenko had taken up to Twitter to explain how the new prioritisation approach works, with the first rollout of the v1.10.25 Solana network update.

On the Twitter post Yakovenko said, “Imagine there is one light switch, a single bit or boolean that everyone wants to flip at the same time. The highest bidder gets to flip the switch. The price to flip that one switch has nothing to do with how fast it flips, or how many can be flipped at the same time.”

However, on Ethereum, this kind of gas fees would mean extremely expensive going up to hundreds and thousands of dollars. And added to it, even one hot NFT drop or token launch can affect the entire network, whereby all Ethereum transaction more expensive in the process.

According to Yakovenko this is not how it works with the new Solana model. He mentioned that each decentralised app acts as a single switch in his analogy he has given on Twitter. “A specific NFT auction, or specific serum market, or orca AMM pool is one switch. The first trader to flip it will flip it first,” he said.