A few weeks ago, this post went viral on Crypto Twitter (CT), drawing a lot of attention and splitting opinions.
It claimed that Solana was literally running out of memory, meaning it was running out of space to store its transactions.
The reason? The growing number of tokens being launched on the network.
The general feeling among “insiders,” memory miners, and validators was one of panic, and the possible solutions sounded tragic.
But how true is that, really?
In this article, we’ll go through it sentence by sentence and explain in a simple way why he is completely wrong.
- Does every new token take up space on-chain?
- How healthy is the Solana network?
- Where does Solana store its data?
- Do dApps influence the network’s health?
- The Question That Remains
First of all, let me introduce myself.
My name is Luis Minello, Head of Growth at SolTap — a dApp on the Solana network that cleans up the chain and rewards users in just a few clicks.
With that said, let's debunk these fallacies.
1. Does every new token take up space on-chain?
It’s completely normal for a token to take up some space on the blockchain, and that’s exactly how it works on Solana.
Every new token requires the creation of an account.
This account stores the token and keeps a record of its current state, including properties such as:
- Who owns it
- How much
- Metadata
- Timestamps
These details aren’t stored in a traditional computer’s memory; they’re stored in Solana’s ledger, which is a historical record that’s constantly being updated.
As long as those tokens exist, their accounts will exist as well, and it is the accounts (not the tokens) that take up space and require permanent storage on high-performance SSDs.
So yes - every token takes up some space, but Solana’s ledger is built for this scale, and handling that growth is entirely within its design.
2. How healthy is the Solana network?
To talk about the network’s health, the best place to start is its internal structure.
Just like you can understand a person’s health by looking at how their organs are functioning, the same idea applies here.
The starting point is understanding that Solana was built and designed to be a high-throughput network, capable of handling a large number of transactions per second.
The Solana network has the structure to handle far more than 12 million tokens being launched per day.
Saying that Solana could collapse due to too many new tokens and a lack of memory is like saying TikTok will collapse because of the large number of spam videos created by bots or AI (both platforms are fully aware of these issues and work to increase their robustness to deal with them).
Some recent stability issues on the network might look like they’re related to memory or a lack of storage space. In reality, they were caused by a massive increase in bot-driven transactions around memecoins, which ended up congesting the system.
This is a network engineering problem, not a storage problem, and challenges like this are part of any high-throughput project.
3. Where does Solana store its data?
Solana uses an account-based model to store its tokens. Every token, NFT, or program on the network is stored in an “account.” To create this account, a small amount of SOL is required as a deposit, and this is what we call “rent”.
The rent amount is fixed at 0.002 SOL.
It’s not a fee because it can be refunded.
When the account is closed and its data is removed, the user gets that amount back.
This mechanism ensures that the network is compensated for storage usage and helps prevent transaction spam.
Even with higher activity, the rent amount does not change.
The only adjustment needed to handle the scale is using high-performance SSDs to support the growing ledger.
4. Do dApps influence the network’s health?
In simple and direct terms: no.
It would be illogical to think that something used arbitrarily could have a direct and essential impact on the network’s health.
And it would be even more illogical to think that something created within the network by builders is somehow essential for the network to support itself.
But to explain this topic, we need to define a few terms:
A dApp is a decentralized application.
There are dApps created specifically to burn useless tokens and close empty accounts, which releases the rent amounts. The example used in the post is SOL Incinerator.
The author of the post says that users aren’t using these applications fast enough, and this seems to be a key factor in the network’s slowdown and overload.
The point is that using these applications is completely optional, depending entirely on the user’s choice, and it does not have a direct impact on the network’s health, even though it can make it lighter.
When you compare the number of accounts created per day with the number of accounts being closed, the result is unbalanced, and this is completely normal because Solana was built to handle this high volume.
5. The Question That Remains
But then you might wonder: if this service isn’t essential for the network’s health, why does it exist?
Relieving the network is only a secondary effect. The main purpose of burn dApps is to reward users by giving them SOL back with just a few clicks.
Traders will always have an amount proportional to their activity to claim, and along the way they can still take a fun break.
There are also gamified features designed to make a trader’s journey more enjoyable. Some sites offer coinflip systems that can double the amount, others have Daily Cases with Solana rewards, and so on.
SolTap aims to make the experience of both traders and everyday Solana users as light and enjoyable as possible, offering different types of gamified rewards, all built on native Solana functions.
Conclusion
There is nothing more insane than proposing a rollback that deletes fundamental network data and harms users on purpose just to fix a problem that doesn’t even exist!
That's insane.
But don't worry, we're here to debunk these fallacies.
I hope you learned a bit more about Solana today!
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