On May 27th, the Solana community voted overwhelmingly in favor of a proposal that would grant network validators 100% of the priority fees generated by users of the network. This decision, which received a 77% majority, marks a significant change from the previous system where priority fees were split evenly between validators and the token-burning mechanism of the Solana network.
Solana (SOL), a cryptocurrency that has experienced a remarkable surge in price since the end of 2023, reaching a peak of approximately $210 in March 2024, is currently trading at around $171. Despite its strong price performance, Solana has been grappling with congestion issues and has suffered from several crashes that have caused the network to go offline on multiple occasions.
The first notable crash occurred in September 2021 when network congestion was exacerbated by bots, resulting in a 17-hour downtime for Solana’s network. Just four months later, in December, the network crashed again due to unusually high levels of traffic. This was followed by another bout of congestion caused by SolChick’s game token sale later that same month.
In 2023, Solana experienced yet another major network outage, once again triggered by abnormally high levels of network traffic. Initially, the validators believed this crash was due to an upgrade in Solana’s validator software. However, rolling back to a previous version of the software failed to resolve the issue. As a result, the validators manually restarted the entire network using the most stable version of the validation software, eventually restoring normal activity.
In response to these high-profile network crashes, Solana’s developers reassured the community that bug fixes and other improvements would be implemented to enhance the Solana blockchain. However, they did not dismiss the possibility of future crashes.
These network outages appear to be an inevitable consequence of the high transaction throughput that Solana boasts. According to data from CoinGecko, the Solana blockchain continues to demonstrate exceptional transaction-per-second metrics, reaching a record high of 1,504 TPS on April 6, 2024. This makes Solana by far the fastest blockchain network, surpassing Ethereum’s current layer-1 speed, as the network strives to strike a balance between reliability and cutting-edge transaction throughput.