Solana's Local Fee Markets Decouple Congestion from TPS
Solana's ability to process transactions quickly is often measured by its transactions per second (TPS) metric. However, this number alone doesn't tell the full story of how the network handles congestion.
The problem with TPS as a metric is that it treats blockspace as one global market. This means that when one application becomes extremely popular and creates a bidding war for blockspace, unrelated applications are forced to compete for the same scarce resource.
Solana's local fee markets address this issue by making congestion localized to the specific state being contested. This is possible because of Solana's account-based execution model, which allows the network to reason about which transactions can execute concurrently and which ones conflict over state.
The prioritization fee in Solana's fee model increases the likelihood that a transaction will be executed ahead of competing transactions. However, this fee is only increased for transactions that compete for access to the same accounts as other users. Unrelated transactions touching different accounts do not face the same contention.