2024-04-16
Austin Federa, the strategy lead for the Solana Foundation, recently discussed the reasons behind the network congestion issues faced by Solana.
According to Federa, the congestion can be attributed to the high demand for Solana block space and a delay in implementing necessary patches for its networking stack.
During Paris Blockchain Week, Federa emphasized the efforts being made to address the congestion issues and improve user transaction experience.
He explained that the Solana project aims to create the fastest, open, permissionless, and decentralized network, but sometimes the engineering team falls short.
While the consensus layer of Solana continues to function as intended, there is a consensus that the network's performance does not meet user expectations.
Currently processing around 700 transactions per second, the Solana network still requires significant work on its core protocol.
To address the bottleneck issues in the networking stack, developers have been planning fixes.
However, the roadmap for implementing upgrades did not align with the expected demand on the network.
Federa acknowledged that this could be seen as a failure in planning and implementing upgrades.
Federa pointed out that the demand for Solana block space is massive, surpassing even Ethereum's layer 1 and layer 2 transactions combined.
He admitted that a more critical view might suggest a failure to anticipate demand spikes based on the network's past usage.
The recent surge in transaction failure rate on Solana was caused by an implementation bug, which the engineers have been working tirelessly to fix.
Federa emphasized that identifying the problem and finding solutions has been a collaborative effort within the ecosystem.
While Solana has faced criticism for network outages in the past, Federa compared the current state of blockchain networks to the early days of Amazon Web Services, where outages were common.
He acknowledged that the blockchain industry is under scrutiny and that expectations for uninterrupted service are justified.
However, he also emphasized the importance of scalability without compromising uptime.
Federa highlighted that downtime and outages are not exclusive to Solana, as other layer 2 protocols like Base, Arbitrum, and Starknet have also faced similar issues recently.
He stated that the industry is still growing and developing, which is why Solana operates under a beta label.
Solana recently released version 1.17.31, which includes enhancements aimed at alleviating network congestion.
This Update is available for general use by mainnet validators since April 15th.
