How to Make Solana Transaction 10ms Faster

Without a Powerful Server Using Shreds

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Without a Powerful Server Using Shreds

Shreds are essential to Solana's efficiency. By utilizing raw shreds directly without conversion, performance can improve particularly for transactions that don’t require immediate state changes. This enhances responsiveness and user experience on the Solana network.

What exactly are shreds in Solana

On Solana shreds are a way of breaking down data into smaller, manageable pieces to speed up the process of validating and adding information to the blockchain.

Imagine that instead of processing an entire book page by page, you tear each page into strips (or shreds) and work on those smaller sections simultaneously.

When a small subset of transaction (like a payment) happens on Solana, it gets divided into these shreds before being sent to the network. Each shred contains part of the transaction data. These shreds get distributed across different nodes, which verify them independently and then send back confirmations. Once all the shreds are verified, they’re pieced back together to form the full transaction, which can then be permanently added to the blockchain.

This approach helps Solana achieve its high speed and low cost

Many nodes can process parts of different transactions at once. Instead of each node doing all the work for every transaction, they’re only responsible for a portion, which they can complete faster. This makes the whole system much more efficient and scalable, even when many people are using it at the same time.

How it works

The leader, during the process of creating a block, sends only a part of the block, called shreds, to other network participants without waiting for the entire block to be fully formed.

Most solutions work as follows: they receive these shreds, convert them into a more convenient format, and pass them on to subscribers, such as trading strategies. This is the standard approach everybody uses, but it requires significant resources.

We discovered a method to enable the trading strategy to use raw shreds directly without conversion obtaining information 10ms faster

Assuming that certain conditions are met.

Advantages of this approach

Some transactions modify the blockchain state, and the “relevance” of a transaction depends on “new state = old state + transaction.” In this case shreds are not useful as full processing of the state is required.

However, there are transactions that determine the state independently: market opening messages, start of sales, completion of pump fun migration. In such cases, we don’t need to wait for the transaction to be processed by a node, allowing us to act instantly.

We were able to connect to shreds without using a node which is significant as it saves time considerably. We measured the performance gain and achieved an acceleration of approximately 10ms compared to Yellowstone gRPC Geyser.

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