Solana DEX failure rates, measured

The short version. Across 7,913 transactions sampled from 7 finalized blocks over roughly 21 minutes, 13.3% of all Solana transactions failed. By venue the spread is far wider: Pump.fun curve failed 87.6% of the transactions that touched it, while Meteora DLMM failed 17%. That difference is the single most under-discussed cost in this category, because a failed swap still pays its fee and produces no volume.

Failure rate by venue

A transaction is counted for a venue when that venue's program appears in the transaction's account list. Aggregator routes therefore appear against the underlying pool as well as the aggregator, which is the correct way to read them for execution purposes.

What people actually pay in priority fees

Priority fee guidance is usually a recommendation. This is the distribution of what was really paid, derived from the fee field of each transaction minus the fixed 5,000 lamport base fee.

69.3% of sampled transactions paid no priority fee at all. That is the number worth sitting with: the fee market is not a flat toll, it is a long tail, and the difference between the median and the p99 is several orders of magnitude. Sizing a campaign against the p99 wastes money; sizing against the median gets you outbid during the exact minutes that matter. The fee breakdown guide works through where this sits in a full campaign budget.

The live fee market

For comparison, the estimator's recommended levels for a busy launchpad program at the time of measurement, in micro-lamports per compute unit:

Network conditions during the sample

• Median throughput: 2,792 transactions per second, p90 2,933.
• Median slot time: 414 ms.
• Median transaction fee across all traffic: 0.000005 SOL, p90 0.00001 SOL.

How this is measured

A scheduled job asks a Solana RPC node for the current finalized slot, then pulls a set of blocks spaced several hundred slots apart so the sample covers a window rather than a single moment. For every transaction in those blocks it records whether the metadata carries an execution error, what fee was charged, and which known DEX programs appear in the account list. Percentiles are computed over the raw values, not over bucketed averages.

What this does not claim: it is a sample, not a census, and a sample taken during unusual conditions will read differently from one taken on a quiet afternoon. Venue attribution counts transactions that touch a program rather than trying to decode instruction data, so a transaction that routes through two venues is counted for both. Figures are republished on every measurement rather than smoothed, which means an unusual week will look unusual here. Our measurement policy covers what else we refuse to estimate.

The raw snapshot behind this page is available as JSON, including the block range and sample sizes, so any figure here can be checked or recomputed.

Why this matters for a campaign

A failure rate is not an abstraction. If a venue rejects a large share of the transactions sent to it, then a campaign routed there pays base and priority fees on every attempt and books volume only on the ones that land. Two campaigns with identical budgets can produce very different volume figures purely because of where they were routed, and that is a decision made before anything is submitted, not after. That is exactly why the console detects the venues holding a pool for your token first and routes across them rather than concentrating on one, which the troubleshooting guide covers from the other direction.