How Solana’s Tech Team is Addressing Congestion Issues – Crypto Head

The Solana Foundation has identified high demand for block space and delays in implementing important patches as the key factors behind recent congestion issues in the network.

Austin Federa, the strategy lead at the Solana Foundation, provided insights during the Paris Blockchain Week into the efforts underway to address congestion problems affecting user transactions.

Federa stated, “The goal of the Solana project is to build the world’s fastest network that is open, permissionless and decentralized, and that is a tall order. There’s a team of engineers across different core contributor groups working on building the Solana network, and sometimes, they don’t quite get it right.”

Despite the challenges, the network’s consensus layer is functioning as intended, according to Federa.

However, from a user experience perspective, the performance is not meeting expectations. “It’s running at about 700 transactions per second now, which is still pretty commendable, even in the sort of degraded state the network is in now. But a lot of work still needs to be done on the Solana core protocol,” he added.

Plans are in place to address “bottleneck” issues within a specific component of the network’s infrastructure.

However, the timelines for these upgrades have not aligned perfectly with the demand forecasts, leading to current issues.

Federa offered a perspective on the situation, saying, “The charitable view of this is a failure of success. There’s massive demand for the Solana block space, and there’s a huge demand for the network. It’s processing more transactions than Ethereum’s layer 1 and layer 2s combined.”

He also acknowledged that a less favorable interpretation would be a failure in planning and executing necessary upgrades.

He noted that developers might have foreseen such spikes in demand based on past network activity.

Recently, Solana developers announced plans to address an “implementation bug” that had led to a high rate of transaction failures.

“It has been an ecosystem effort to identify the problem, potential solutions, and short-term and long-term improvements to the network,” Federa explained, mentioning that engineers have been working tirelessly, testing patches before deploying them to the mainnet.

Solana has faced criticism for network outages over the past two years.

Like its competitors, including several Ethereum layer-2 solutions that have also experienced downtime, Solana continues to evolve.

Federa compared the current stage of blockchain development to the early days of Amazon Web Services, which also faced significant challenges.

Addressing the scrutiny of blockchain technologies, Federa said, “I think it’s appropriate to be upset about downtimes and outages. The goal is 100% uptime, and that should be the goal for the whole industry. If that comes at the expense of no scale, that’s not necessarily the best trade-off.”

He further noted that the continued use of a beta label by Solana is a candid acknowledgment of the network’s ongoing development and suggested that other networks might also benefit from such transparency.

On April 15, Solana released version 1.17.31 for mainnet validators, featuring improvements expected to reduce network congestion.

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