TL; DR
Full story
Picture this…
You’re traveling and break your arm (not great), so you go to the emergency room (expensive, yes – but that’s what insurance is for).
You arrive and are quickly told that the wait time is ~2 hours (very doable).
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2 hours passed…and nothing (okay, this is an emergency room anyway – they will get to you eventually)
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4 hours passed (“man, they need to be slammed” – you make eye contact with the nurse at the reception – she smiles as if to say, “I haven’t forgotten you”)
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8 hours passed (“how injured do you have to be to see a doctor here?”)
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16 hours passed (“Damn, I’m about to break my other arm just so I can see someone!”)
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32 hours passed before you realize it: the nurse behind the counter takes bribes from people to cross the line! (Your anger knows no bounds)
That ☝️ right there ☝️ is what is currently happening on Solana.
Some of Solana’s “client” developers (aka the people responsible for writing software that allows people to access/transact on the Solana network) have created things called “mempools” (aka called ‘transaction waiting rooms’).
And just like the nurse in the story above, these mempool operators will move your transaction to the front of the line if you grease their palms a little.
The problem is:
These fee-based mempools can be manipulated to enable bot attacks.
Additionally, during times of increased activity on the Solana network, regular users experience slow and clunky experiences as they are continually pushed to the back of the queue.
(Which is a problem, since Solana’s entire value pitch is essentially “we operate at the speed of light”)
The solution?
Ax the mempools and return to a ‘first in, best dressed’ fashion model.
That’s exactly what Jito – the largest mempool operator on Solana – has just done.
But it’s not a perfect solution…
This is where things get a little crazy
Mempools are not a standard feature of Solana. Instead, they are created and managed by third-party developers.
In the same way that Flappy Bird was not developed by the makers of our iOS/Android operating systems, but instead by a third-party developer called Dong Nguyen.
And when Dong dropped support for Flappy Bird, others saw an opportunity and started flooding app stores with Flappy Bird copycats.
(The same could happen with mempools on Solana).