‘Normal Users Fail at 5%, Traders at 90%’ — Raiku CEO on Solana’s Hidden Transaction Crisis

With debates over Solana’s performance and decentralization heating up, Raiku positions itself as a coordination layer that sits close to validators and gives sophisticated users something they rarely see in crypto.

Raiku offers predictable execution for transactions that currently move through Solana’s optimistic, best-effort model.

Raiku is a coordination system that connects applications directly with validators and lets them reserve block space in advance. It aims to cut down failed transactions, reduce noise during congestion, and give traders a clear expectation of when their transactions will land.

In an interview with CCN, Raiku CEO Robin Nordnes explains why transaction failures on Solana hurt “normal users” and sophisticated traders in different ways, how Raiku’s “warrantied block inclusion” works in practice, and why the real battle is about power in transaction ordering, not only throughput.

“Right now everyone doesn’t matter what user group or stakeholder is sending transactions to the network. It’s based on an optimistic model.”

That optimistic model is what Raiku wants to replace with a more explicit, market-based structure for block space.

Why Solana’s Transaction Failure Rate Is Not the Same for Every User

Public dashboards and social media often cite dramatic failure numbers for Solana. Robin argues that the real picture depends on who sends the transaction and what they need from the network.

For everyday users running simple swaps or buys, he says the situation looks very different from the claims that go viral on X.

According to Robin, for “normal users” doing basic DeFi actions, “it can be anything from 5% which usually refers to normal users.” That roughly “5% failure rate… typically happens during congestion.”

The situation shifts when the focus moves to high-frequency trading firms, bots, and other advanced actors that need precise timing.

As he explains, “That number can be at 45% and in edge cases even up to 90% failure rates and this makes it very difficult for sophisticated market players.”

In his view, those high failure rates are not a bug or a quirk. They are a direct consequence of how Solana’s current transaction pipeline works and how different user groups interact with it under pressure.

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The Cost of “Optimistic” Execution

Robin describes Solana today as a network where everyone submits transactions on hope rather than explicit guarantees.

“So you send a transaction and then you hope for the best that it will be executed and included at the time you want it to, but you don’t know, right? So it’s optimistic.”

For sophisticated senders, this uncertainty becomes costly. If they need a trade to land at a specific point in a block, they blast the network with retries:

“They try and try again for this transaction to land as soon as possible and that creates noise. And the more noise you also create, the more the network will be impacted. And thus the number of transactions which will fail goes higher and higher.”

Raiku’s design responds directly to that feedback loop of spam and congestion.

What Raiku Means by Warrantied Block Inclusion

Raiku wants to replace Solana’s optimistic transaction model with a clearer structure for when a transaction will land.

Instead of guessing when a block will include an action, Raiku gives transaction senders a receipt that reflects reserved block space.

Robin explains that the system lets users plan execution ahead of time:

“You can sort this by allowing transaction centers to approximate roughly when the transaction will be executed and included by basically providing them a receipt. A receipt that they can get ahead of time, such that they know they have space in a block whenever that block will be produced.”

When CCN asked him what happens when Raiku’s warrantied block inclusion fails, Robin responded without hesitation:

“Spot on, there is never such a thing as a 100% guarantee. However, you can certainly increase the probability of an event to happen. Our job is to decrease the probabilities of that happening and then get as close to a guarantee as we can possibly get.”

In practice, what Raiku offers is a more structured and auditable path toward predictable inclusion than the firehose model Solana relies on today.

Raiku’s Role in Solana’s Blockspace: Coordination Without Control

Robin describes Raiku as “an air traffic control center” that coordinates messages but does not decide who gets block space. He stresses that Raiku avoids centralization risks:

“It is not the component that says who gets in and also who doesn’t get in… it is pretty much all down to will you win the bid or not.”

Raiku runs several block-space markets and aims to make the bidding process more efficient while keeping decisions in the hands of market participants.

MEV, Validator Incentives and Solana’s Decentralization Path

Robin explains that Raiku targets incentives and routing rather than consensus.

“We are not changing the Nakamoto coefficient or the decentralized properties of the base network.” The goal is to improve transaction flow, validator economics and cluster inefficient nodes.

As he puts it, “We are impacting the decentralization part, but not directly.”

On minimal extractable value (MEV), he is direct: “Certain nodes are extracting as most profit as they can by basically doing sandwich attacks… that’s not great for the user.”

Raiku’s architecture removes intermediaries entirely:

“We’re removing the middlemen completely… priority is paid down directly to the validator themself.”

Reliability, Upgrades and the Long-Term Vision for Raiku

Validators integrate Raiku through a lightweight sidecar. Even if every Raiku node failed, Robin says Solana continues operating:

“There is no dependency… the underlying network Solana will still be able to operate… normal transactions… would still continue to run.”

Only Raiku’s advanced marketplaces would pause. In his view, “The probability of Riku’s nodes going down is extremely small.”

Robin also draws a firm line when the conversation turns to investor influence. He makes it clear that no level of funding or external pressure can override Raikou’s core principles.

As he puts it, “What will not be compromised on is underlying security and efficiency. You can’t harm the users or the network.”

His long-term vision is to make on-chain systems competitive with established financial rails: “It has to be equivalent or better to the options that we have today.”

The hardest challenges, he says, come from the political nature of free markets: Who gets prioritized and why… who ends up not getting prioritized?

Even simple choices carry “so many secondary effects.” Raiku’s path forward requires navigating those trade-offs without compromising the network or its users.

As Solana scales, projects like Raiku show that the next stage of blockchain development will be defined not only by consensus and throughput, but by the systems built around them.

For Robin, the real work lies in keeping that coordination transparent, predictable and aligned with the network’s broader ecosystem.