Solana Exec Reveals Actual Reason Behind Recent Congestion

Solana (SOL), a blockchain project renowned for its speed and scalability, recently faced a notable outage. It prompted significant scrutiny and discussion within the crypto community as some shifted to Ethereum, Solana’s eternal rival. In a recent statement, Austin Federa, Head of Strategy at the Solana Foundation, shed light on the actual cause behind the congestion and the ongoing efforts to address them.

Austin Federa Explains What Caused Solana Outage

Prior to revealing the reasons, Federa noted that developers have been working hard to fix the Solana congestion, which has caused failure of over 75% transactions. In a post on X, Federa wrote, “Developers from Anza, Firedancer, Jito, and other core contributors are working diligently (and not sleeping much) to shore up Solana’s networking stack to meet the unprecedented demand the network is seeing today.”

In addition, Federa acknowledged the existence of diverse opinions on the root cause of the congestion. However, he clarified that fundamentally, it stems from the inadequacy of the software system to handle the current volume effectively. He stated, “At a high level the issue is conceptually simple: the implementation of a software system is today not robust enough to handle the amount of traffic being thrown at it.”

Furthermore, he addressed the technical debt within Solana’s architecture. Federa highlighted the trade-off between prioritizing new developments and essential maintenance and improvement tasks. He emphasized, “This is, put simply, tech debt.”

Additionally, Federa reassured the community that despite the setback, core protocol developers are diligently implementing and testing improvements to alleviate the Solana network outage. He stated, “Core protocol developers from across the ecosystem are working as swiftly as they can to implement and test improvements in the networking stack to address the current network congestion.”

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About The Recent SOL Congestion

Last week, Solana experienced a significant increase in transaction failures, exceeding 75% over recent days. This sparked concerns about its ability to handle heightened network activity. The Solana congestion also ignited debates within the community regarding network’s future as a prominent Layer-1 blockchain.

Moreover, the price of SOL has weakened against Ethereum, especially as Ethereum surged to a new high in March. With ongoing network challenges, this could widen the gap, potentially allowing Ethereum to regain some of its lost ground from earlier in 2023.

Users of Solana’s popular Phantom wallet have reported prolonged transaction times and an increase in failed transactions in the past week. These issues arose following a surge in network activity, particularly driven by meme coins and liquid staking on Solana’s Decentralized Exchanges (DEXes).

Matt Sorg, Product and Tech strategist at the Solana Foundation, clarified that the high rate of failed transactions is not a flaw but rather an intentional aspect of the network designed to safeguard users. Notably, over 80% of these failed transactions are attributed to error code “0x1771”, indicating an exceeded slippage amount.

In essence, failed transactions occur when users seek to capitalize on volatile Solana meme coins. These cryptocurrencies have varying prices across different Solana DEXes. Hence, if the price deviates beyond the user’s set slippage amount, the transaction is bound to fail. This mechanism is deliberately integrated into the network.

However, Sorg highlighted that the primary concern lies not with failed transactions but rather with dropped transactions. These occur when a transaction fails to be included in the final block for various reasons.

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