The Solana community recently held a vote on May 27, where it was decided that network validators would receive 100% of the priority fees generated by network users. The vote was successful, with a majority of 77% in favor of the decision.
In the past, Solana’s priority fees were divided equally between rewarding validators and the token-burning mechanism of the Solana network. However, this new vote changes that allocation, giving all priority fees to the validators.
Solana’s token, SOL, has seen a significant price increase since the end of 2023. It reached a peak of around $210 in March 2024 and is currently trading at approximately $171.
Despite the strong price performance of Solana, the network has been facing congestion issues and has experienced several crashes. These crashes have caused the network to go down on at least four separate occasions.
The first notable crash occurred in September 2021, when network congestion was exacerbated by bots, resulting in a 17-hour network outage. Just four months later, in December, Solana crashed again due to unusually high traffic. The network also faced congestion issues in the same month during SolChick’s game token sale.
In 2023, Solana experienced another major network outage caused by high network traffic. Initially, validators believed the crash was due to an upgrade in Solana’s validator software. However, rolling back to a previous version of the software did not solve the problem. The validators then manually restarted the entire network using the most stable version of the validation software, which restored normal activity.
Following these high-profile network crashes, Solana’s developers assured the community that they would implement bug fixes and other improvements to the Solana blockchain. However, they did acknowledge the possibility of future crashes.
These network outages seem to be a consequence of the high transaction throughput on the Solana blockchain. According to CoinGecko, the Solana blockchain has consistently achieved record-breaking transaction per-second metrics. On April 6, 2024, it reached a peak of 1,504 transactions per second. This makes Solana the fastest blockchain network, surpassing Ethereum’s current layer-1 speed, as the network strives to balance reliability with cutting-edge transaction throughput.