The recent network congestion issues faced by the Solana Foundation can be attributed to a combination of high demand for Solana block space and a delay in implementing patches related to its networking stack. Austin Federa, the strategy lead of the Solana Foundation, discussed the efforts being made to address these problems during Paris Blockchain Week. Federa explained that the goal of the Solana project is to create the world’s fastest network that is open, permissionless, and decentralized, which is a challenging task. He acknowledged that the team of engineers working on the Solana network sometimes make mistakes. Despite the current degraded state of the network, Solana’s consensus layer is still functioning as intended, but it falls short of meeting user experience expectations. Federa stated that the network currently operates at around 700 transactions per second, which is commendable, but more work needs to be done on the Solana core protocol. The developers are planning to fix the bottleneck issues in a specific component of its networking stack implementation. However, there was a mismatch between the roadmap for implementing upgrades and the expected demand on the Solana network. Federa admitted that a less charitable interpretation of the situation suggests a failure to plan and implement network upgrades. He also mentioned that ecosystem developers could have anticipated the demand spikes based on the network’s past usage. Solana has faced criticism for network outages in the past, but other protocols like Ethereum layer-2s Base, Arbitrum, and Starknet have also experienced similar issues in recent months. Federa compared the current phase of emerging blockchain networks to the early days of Amazon Web Services, which also experienced outages. However, he acknowledged that the blockchain industry is under scrutiny, and there are legitimate expectations for its performance. Federa emphasized that Solana still operates under a beta label because it is still in the development and growth phase, similar to other layer-2 protocols that have faced downtime and outages. Solana released version 1.17.31 on April 15, which includes enhancements aimed at addressing the ongoing congestion on the network.
Ingenious Solutions by Solana Developers to Overcome Network Congestion Hurdles